With more than one hundred paintings and drawings, Fuyuko Matsui’s solo exhibition “Becoming Friends with All the Children in the World” demonstrated a unique vision that embraces death and the dissolution of identity as a means of inspiring passion for life. The paintings are mostly done in the traditional Nihonga style, with powdered mineral pigments on silk, and Matsui succeeds in showing that this eclectic genre of painting—which was established in the late nineteenth century and amalgamates various classical Japanese and Chinese techniques while accepting Western models of realistic