The Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center will present Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun, a contemporary response to Hopper’s iconic 1952 painting, from June 20 to October 5, 2025. Japanese American artist Matsu (Tomokazu Matsuyama) reinterprets Hopper’s themes of isolation and urban life through a globalized, consumer-driven lens, transforming quiet melancholy into a deep, layered meditation on modern solitude.

At the heart of the exhibition is Morning Sun Dance, Matsu’s large-scale reworking of Hopper’s original. Where Hopper’s woman sits alone on a bed in an austere room, bathed in pale light, Matsu’s version fills the space with the clutter of contemporary life: designer furniture, stacked magazines, and two small dogs, references to historical art symbols of wealth that here underscore loneliness rather than comfort. The woman’s hybrid outfit (William Morris meets Japanese tradition) and a Muhammad Ali poster on the wall speak to identity in a connected yet fragmented world. Most strikingly, while Hopper’s subject gazes out the window, Matsu’s turns inward, her solitude framed not by empty streets but by the artifacts of her own consumption.

The show also includes process sketches and two smaller paintings that revisit Hopper’s orange-clad figure, one from the original perspective, another as if observed from outside. These studies reveal Matsu’s engagement with Hopper’s light and composition, even as he subverts them with bold color and cultural collage.

“Matsu’s work doesn’t just echo Hopper, it converses with him,” says Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, the museum’s Executive Director. The exhibition positions both artists as chroniclers of isolation, separated by decades but united by their interrogation of how we inhabit space, both physical and psychological.

Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun opens June 20 with a reception at 6:30 PM (RSVP via the museum’s website), supported by SRI Fine Art Services and the New York Council on the Arts.