Ota Fine Arts is pleased to hold the exhibition of Hiraki Sawa, linking to his current solo exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Gallery.

Hiraki Sawa was born in Kanazawa in 1977. After graduating from high school, he moved his base to the UK and in 2002 he made an impressive debut with a single channel work, "dwelling" which displayed numerous model airplanes flying around the room. In recent years, he started to be called 'mid-career' instead of 'emerging artist' and he held extensive solo exhibitions at Dundee Arts Centre, Scotland and at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. Linking to these exhibitions, Ota Fine Arts display Sawa's work "O" (2009) in a different version. In 2009, "O" has been exhibited in the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane and became their collection. Sawa spend a month in Australia to shoot the nature landscape which appears in the work.

Over ten years of his career, Sawa has been showing his interests in the concepts of time and motion, travel and mobility, displacement and dislocation. Having lived in London and Japan over many years, the concepts of travel and mobility formed very familiar issue for his work. For example, his earlier works often showed indoor scenes as 'inside of the house' and as contrast, they showed moon, trees and nature scenes as 'outside of the house'. Hiraki Sawa transformed these boundaries into the journey between actual and imagined worlds. He says, '"O" brings together domestic objects spinning endlessly; the vast expanse of a desert landscape; the distant fields of the moon's surface; the empty interiors of a house long abandoned, a home not waiting for its absent owner's return but simply left alone to be...'

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Ota Fine Arts