The painter Naoto Nakagawa was 18 when he boarded a cargo ship in Osaka, Japan, and left home to sail to New York City in 1962. “Not speaking English, not knowing anything, all I had was my ambition,” Mr. Nakagawa said recently. His artwork has made similar leaps into strange worlds, moving in seemingly opposing directions stylistically, but ultimately achieving, in the rendering, a breakdown of barriers between Asian and American contemporary art. This month, two New York galleries will jointly present works from the earliest and latest junctures in Mr. Nakagawa’s four decades of artistic activity.

Mr. Nakagawa, now 63, recalls that he had planned to leave Japan, where he had studied art since junior high school, to move to Paris. But a show of American Expressionists at a department store in Osaka inspired a dramatic change in his itinerary. Once he arrived in New York, he enrolled in the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and was swiftly absorbed into New York’s avant-garde, participating in happenings and experimental film.

His first solo exhibition took place at the Judson Memorial Church in 1968. Early reviews of Mr. Nakagawa’s work hailed its “hard-edged” realism. In subsequent decades, Mr. Nakagawa has shown his work in major modern art museums throughout America, Europe, and Japan, including the Museum of Modern Art and, in Tokyo, the Fukuoka Museum.

In preparation for his upcoming exhibits, Mr. Nakagawa has pulled paintings from storage he has not laid eyes on in the past few decades. Moving from room to room in his TriBeCa studio, viewing the canvases propped against the walls, Mr. Nakagawa marveled at his own artistic migration. “Some painters never change for 40 years,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not him!”

On Saturday, White Box Gallery will open the retrospective “Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted — Naoto Nakagawa 1965–1975.” When his giant pop-art canvases of anthropomorphized household items made their debut at the OK Harris Gallery in 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, and other counterculture celebrities were in attendance.

Unlike that of Warhol, Mr. Nakagawa’s imagination did not wander among the supermarket aisles. Instead, he rummaged among the items crammed into a household’s bathroom cabinets and basement workshops. In “Echo I” and “Echo II,” each canvas extends more than 12 feet across the wall. Within them, scissors struggle to release themselves from their rubberband shackles while an enormous hammer head smashes its mirrored reflection. “These paintings are loaded with conflict,” Mr. Nakagawa said. “The surreal, sexual imagery and the painfully raw colors look very angry to me now.” The paintings also demonstrate Mr. Nakagawa’s impressive technical skills. The uniform finish and almost imperceptible outlines appear spray-painted, but are actually the results of Mr. Nakagawa’s own careful brushwork.

Although he went on to scale back the size of his canvases, Mr. Nakagawa continued to explore the overlapping boundaries between surrealism and still life. In the process, he perfected his precise rendering of the sensuous surfaces of both natural and manmade objects. Often, he painted odd assortments of items laid out on a tabletop, creating a kind of interior landscape.

By the 1990s, however, the organic displaced the inorganic. As Mr. Nakagawa moved outside and began painting the forest floor, his work evolved to address his growing preoccupation with what he perceived as the widening chasm between contemporary civilization and the natural world. Once again, his canvases stretched several feet across the walls of his studio. An exhibition of paintings completed since 2004, “Screams of Nature: Recent Paintings of Naoto Nakagawa” will open at the Ethan Cohen Gallery on March 15. The diptych “Forest of Eden,” demonstrates how, without relinquishing his commitment to verisimilitude, Mr. Nakagawa’s vision became increasingly magnified. The dense layers of twigs, branches, shoots, and leaves burst forth in titanic proportions “The space is claustrophobic. It’s not letting you in. It’s keeping you out,” Mr. Nakawaga said.

His palette of electric blues and fiery reds reflects Mr. Nakagawa’s belief that civilization is hostile toward nature. Through painting, he wants to empower nature to push back. “I want to show what nature can offer to man to raise man’s consciousness,” he said. Mr. Nakawaga’s affinity for landscape is also influenced by his maternal grandfather, Kagaku Murakami, one of Japan’s great modern brush-andink painters who also wrote an influential art-theory text about connections between Buddhism and painting. Murakami wrote: “The act of painting is a prayer in a secret chamber.”

Murakami died before his grandson was born, but in a way, Mr. Nakagawa has converted the spiritual striving of his grandfather’s art into a moral call to arms. Firm contours and thick oil paint take the place of the ink and brush that Murakami exploited in his early modern masterpieces produced in the 1920s and ’30s.

“You find in both Western and Eastern art a safe distance between the artist and the land. I don’t do that. I pull nature as close as I can so that the viewer is completely enveloped,” he said. “And always it is that beauty I am seeking — desperately.”