Japan Creative Centre (JCC) is pleased to present "Hiroshi Sugito: Paintings and Sketches", a special Arts Exhibition focusing on his most recent works - sketches, paintings, and photographs produced during a trip to Hanamaki in Japan's Iwate Prefecture. This exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to bring to Singapore the unique world of Sugito's paintings inspired by his trip to Iwate, featuring scenes of the magnificent mountains and surrounding countryside that enthralled him.

Hiroshi Sugito is one of Japan's best-known contemporary painters, on par with Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami. His patterns of colors create skies, seas, or theatrical stages with a strange depth that seems to draw viewers into the painting. Planes, ships, chairs, cars, and difficult-to-identify abstract forms emerge from thinly painted canvasses, as if beginning to tell a tale recalled from a dream.

Iwate Prefecture took a terrible hit from the recent earthquake and tsunami, but in the inland areas where the damage was relatively light there are still woodland and pastoral scenes of the sort written about by Kenji Miyazawa, a native of Hanamaki. Sugito's works seem to resonate strongly with the clear air and wide-open space of the land that Miyazawa called "Ihatov."

The exhibition also presents models produced by architect Jun Aoki for "leaves and fields (cobweb and spider) - Jun Aoki and Hiroshi Sugito." a collaboration with Sugito for the Aomori Museum of Art. Scheduled for April 2011, this joint exhibition was cancelled in the aftermath of the earthquake.

About the Artist

Born in Aichi, Japan in 1970, Hiroshi Sugito lived in New York from age 4 to 14. He graduated in Japanese-style painting from the Aichi Prefectural University of Arts in 1992. Since then, retaining a base in Aichi, he has traveled and worked in many areas of Japan, and also in Austria, Germany, and America. On occasion he has produced collaborations with artists such as Yoshitomo Nara. His works are held by art museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Recent solo exhibitions include "April Song" at The Sculpture Garden Museum, Japan (2006) and "Focus" at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2006). He participated in "The 7th Gwangju Biennale" (2008).