The Shiseido Gallery is pleased to announce that it will host an exhibition by London-based Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa. This exhibition, titled Lineament, will run from April 7th (Sat) through June 17th (Sun), 2012.
Hiraki Sawa was born in 1977 in Japan's Ishikawa prefecture. In 1996 he enrolled in the Fine Art Foundation Course at the University of East London, then later went on to earn an M.F.A. degree in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College, also in London. Originally focused on sculpture, he eventually turned to video as his primary expressive medium. Having earned critical acclaim for his work dwelling in 2002, Sawa made London his home base and has been active ever since on the international scene. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Yokohama Triennial 2005, the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, the Chengdu Biennale in China, and the Biennale of Sydney in Australia. His work has also been featured in museums around the world, and he has participated in such exhibitions as Six Good Reasons to Stay Home at the National Museum of Victoria (Melbourne, 2006), Artist File at the National Art Centre (Tokyo, 2008), Carrousel at the Musée du Temps and Musée National des Beaux-Arts de Besançon (France, 2009), and Sanso-Bigaku at the Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Museum (Kyoto, 2010).
Thus far, Sawa has drawn inspiration mostly from refreshing everyday happenings that he himself has experienced. In his earlier works, like dwelling (2002), elsewhere (2003) and trail (2005), he integrated familiar items found in his room at home ― a toy airplane, dishes, stationary supplies, animal shadows ― as allegorical images to create fantastic scenes within ordinary spaces, an approach that found wide appeal. In more recent years, he has been exploring and expanding the potential of video as an expressive medium, using multiscreen projections and sound effects situated in three-dimensional spaces to create installations that attempt to transform video from something merely watched to something physically experienced. For the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Sawa moved into new realms of expression with an installation titled O (2009), in which he interpreted feelings resonating within him during his travels around Australia's aboriginal outback as turning, spiraling time intervals linked together and expressed in space using video and sounds.
Lately, inspired by the experience of a friend with amnesia, Sawa has been undertaking a new project called "Figment," in which he inquires into the nature of memory and remembering. Interested in how the "gaps" that come from memory loss can rock reality, Sawa asks, "Doesn't the fact that memory loss can make you forget even what certain foods taste like show how very dependent we are on memory?" In this latest new video installation, Lineament, Sawa gives us the figure of a man looking back on his memories from a room in which the borderline between fiction and reality wavers back and forth, drawing our attention to how ambiguous the idea of "normal" really is. In this exhibition, this work will be shown along with two others from the "Figment" series, did i? and sleeping machine.
This exhibition offers a fine opportunity to see this new approach by Hiraki Sawa as he moves from the expression of spiritual landscapes deeper into the realms of surrealism.
