Issei Nishimura (1978) was born and brought up in Nagoya, Japan. As a child, he particularly enjoyed drawing. After moving to Tokyo to study music – he plays the electric guitar – Nishimura found it hard to find his place in society and gradually withdrew from the world, especially after a series of paranoid episodes. His drawing became an important part of his life, and he returned to live in Nagoya, where he currently resides with his family. However, he continues to play music and is greatly inspired by American blues. He enjoys the company of his cat and hardly ever leaves the house. 
Nishimura often launches spontaneously into a new drawing, devoting little time to preparatory work. His subjects are based on his personal interests and everyday environment: music, his cat or other animals, plants, and sometimes even a thought. He uses pads of drawing paper, on which he also depicts mysterious, humanoid creatures, whose bodies, and especially faces, appear fractured and disarticulated. Rendered in dense, undulating black lines, some of these faces feature multiple eyeballs, as well as mouths filled with a mass of tiny teeth. This is not to neglect his prolific production of felt-tip pen and charcoal drawings – he sometimes fills several sketchbooks a day – and his painting, which depicts abstract forms or figures in bright colours on large canvases.