Kei Sugiyama’s art takes inspiration from Aristotle’s philosophy of metaphysics and, by extension, the gray zone between absence and existence. His motivation for painting is to evoke a being expected to be present, that is, a subject that occurs in the mind as a result of the actual motif presented on canvas. As a Nihonga painter, the concept of a master-servant relationship in art is not foreign to Sugiyama. One of the basic principles of Nihonga is to observe the subject (or a model), carefully sketch it, and then begin production. An artist’s job was merely to bring out the best in the subject. In other words, a painter is the subordinate of his subject. Yet, as a contemporary artist, Sugiyama seeks to explore relationships beyond that.