The Places We Carry: Jimmy Onishi’s “Hometown” Comes to Ehime

A hometown need not be the place where you were born

The word “hometown” suggests certainty: a birthplace, perhaps, or the streets of childhood. Jimmy Onishi’s exhibition in Matsuyama proposes something more elastic. A place can enter a person’s imaginative life through temporary residence, conversation, work or a brief but lasting encounter. The artist’s original works are the means through which the organizers ask visitors to consider that process.

“Jimmy Onishi: Hometown” is on view at the Museum of Art, Ehime, from October 3 through November 8, 2026. Its subject is not a nostalgic return to the artist’s birthplace. Instead, it follows how different places have shaped an artistic practice that grew out of Japanese television and travelled well beyond Japan.

The facts of the Matsuyama exhibition

The exhibition occupies Special Exhibition Room 2 on the first floor of the museum’s main building in central Matsuyama. Hours are 9:40 a.m.–6 p.m., with last entry at 5:30 p.m. Scheduled closures include October 13, 19 and 26, and November 4. Standard same-day admission is ¥1,200 for adults, ¥1,000 for university and high-school students, and ¥800 for elementary and junior-high students.

These details come from the museum and co-organizer. This is a researched feature rather than a firsthand review: the author has not independently inspected the display, counted visitors or spoken to attendees. The distinction matters when publicizing an exhibition that is already open.

From the small screen to a large canvas

Onishi first became famous as a television comedian. According to the project’s own historical account, a television initiative in 1992 encouraged him to begin painting seriously. A viewer might treat that as a celebrity diversion; for Onishi, the organizers say, it became the beginning of another sustained vocation.

The exhibition also recounts encouragement he received from the artist Taro Okamoto to work beyond conventional limits. That account is attributed to the organizers rather than presented as a newly verified verbatim interview. What can be said is that Onishi’s public identity shifted: drawing and painting were no longer an entertaining aside to his television career.

Why Spain matters to the story

Onishi subsequently left his entertainment work for a period and moved to Spain. The exhibition’s organizers describe a visible transformation in his approach after living there. Spain did not merely provide a different background to depict. Living abroad required him to experience the ordinary texture of a foreign place through people, routines and unfamiliar settings.

It would be too easy to assign specific colors or shapes in particular paintings to specific Spanish experiences without the artist’s testimony or rigorous individual work records. The more defensible claim is that the exhibition treats geographical movement as a force in artistic development, not simply as a source of picturesque subject matter.

The exhibition that moves with its artist

The Hometown series began in Nagasaki in 2024 and has subsequently been presented in cities including Toyama, Oita and Kochi. Ehime is part of a continuing itinerary, with a Kyoto presentation scheduled from December 5, 2026, through February 7, 2027. The format is itself significant: each host city becomes part of the subject under examination.

The organizers say Onishi visits and spends time in local communities, engages with residents and develops new work as he begins to think of each location as another kind of hometown. That is a curatorial claim about the series’ process, not evidence that every named locality appears in a specific Matsuyama gallery work.

Painting place without making a map

Conventional travel art can be assessed by whether it depicts a recognizable landmark. This project invites a different form of looking. A work may transmit the emotional residue of a place without offering a literal street plan or postcard view. What mattered to its maker may have been a conversation, an encounter or the feeling of returning after a journey.

This is an interpretation of the exhibition’s premise, not a quotation from Onishi. It gives visitors a useful alternative to searching every image for its geographic coordinates. The question becomes less “where is that?” and more “what happened to the artist’s imagination there?”

Why the idea resonates in Ehime

Ehime itself comprises strikingly different ways of living: Matsuyama and its castle-town heritage, the industrial landscapes of Niihama and eastern Ehime, the shipbuilding and maritime activity around Imabari, and the smaller coastal and agricultural communities of the south. Each may be home to someone who left, returned or arrived from elsewhere.

The exhibition offers a cultural lens through which to consider such movement. It would nevertheless be inaccurate to call every painting an Ehime landscape or to claim the artist has documented particular local residents without identifying the work and its source. Its local relevance is conceptual as well as geographic.

Celebrity is not a critical method

Articles about Onishi can fall into a comfortable formula: a famous comedian unexpectedly proves he can paint. The formulation is accessible, but it can prevent serious engagement with the work. His biography opens a door; it cannot substitute for looking closely at composition, material, imagery and the changes visible across a career.

Nor should the relationship between comedy and visual art be romanticized as a proven theory of creativity. If viewers detect rhythmic repetition, visual surprise or exuberance, those are critical observations to test against the works. The museum’s concentration on original paintings offers a chance to examine them without a screen persona standing in the way.

What an original artwork carries

Reproductions travel easily across screens and printed catalogues. Originals preserve information that photographs often flatten: the physical scale of a composition, accumulated layers of paint, the meeting of materials and the traces of decisions made during production. These are reasons a large-scale original-work exhibition may repay a visit even for people familiar with Onishi’s imagery.

The project website profiles works including “Malta” (2012), “Tanzania: A Distant Dream” (2009), “Jonetsu Tairiku” (1999) and “Barça” (1997). Their appearance on the series website is not proof that each is on the walls in Matsuyama; the article deliberately avoids making that leap.

The economic question a museum cannot settle alone

A touring exhibition may broaden access to contemporary art and bring audiences into a regional institution. It can also connect one city to a wider national cultural circuit. Yet claims about tourism benefits require visitor surveys, spending estimates and measured outcomes, none of which follow automatically from an exhibition announcement.

That caution is especially relevant in a prefecture attempting to strengthen its economy while confronting population decline. Cultural vitality is meaningful in its own right; it need not be justified with invented multipliers or unsupported claims about overnight visitors.

How to look at “Hometown”

One way to visit is to begin with the image rather than the biography. Where does the eye return? Which shapes or materials seem to carry the strongest emphasis? Then read the title, date and any account of where Onishi was living or travelling at the time. That sequence can make the relationship between experience and artistic form an object of inquiry rather than an assumption.

Any particular hanging order or interpretation offered by a curator must be checked in the gallery itself. The approach suggested here is an editorial invitation to visitors, not an eyewitness description of the installation.

The places we carry forward

Onishi’s travelling project suggests that belonging can be made, not merely inherited. Someone may acquire a second or third hometown through work, friendship, language or an unexpected feeling of connection. The concept speaks to modern Japan, where migration for education and employment continually remakes communities and families.

Matsuyama is one chapter in that story. What visitors take away may depend less on identifying a famous destination than on remembering a place that once changed the way they saw the world. That possibility makes the show more than a celebrity exhibition: it is an inquiry into how places become part of us.