HOMEOSTASIS
Term: April 10 - May 26, 2023
Artist: Kazutaka Hirota
The 24th ITbM Gallery presented "HOMEOSTASIS" by Kazutaka Hirota.
A descendant of Korean immigrants in Japan who studied art in the United States, he feels like an outsider to all three cultures and the art scenes within them. However, he uses this "in-between" position to create his own culture as an artist, using his work to mediate between individual and nature-ness and provide cultural nutrition to the people today who are isolated from their own nature-ness. It is a HOMEOSTASIS for maintaining a healthy life. He compares his artwork to farming products, as both are a collaboration between humans and nature, providing essential nutrition. He sees himself as standing in between the audience and nature, extracting and showing the essence of nature through his art. Hirota's "Color Itching", "Color Knitting", and "Collage/Assemblage" series were featured in this exhibition.
Color Itching
Hirota combines Western art with Japanese Buddhist ideas influenced by Chinese Taoism to achieve a balance in human existence. He aims to connect his audience with nature through non-verbal expression that does not rely on rationality which isolates humans from nature and always demands existing exact answers at any given moment. His painting process is guided by the Taoist term "mui-shizen," which emphasizes the autonomy and spontaneity of the painting, making it a natural phenomenon of form and color on the picture frame.
Color Knitting
In 2015, Hirota created a system called Color Knitting, which utilizes cross-hatching to create the patterns inspired by Japanese fabrics and baskets. The paintings combine traditional Japanese culture with globally recognizable consumerist tropes. The color palette is drawn from a toy purchased at Toys r us, and the compositions are developed through the traditional Japanese paper collage method called “chigirie”. The square canvas shape is derived from the shape of origami paper, and the paintings retain a hand-painted quality with slight irregularities to achieve the Japanese concept of "wabisabi," meaning the beauty of impermanence and the balance of perfection and imperfection.
Collage / Assemblage
Kazutaka Hirota, an Asian artist, does not feel a strong connection to the Western tradition, although he was fascinated by it in the past. He has studied Western history extensively, but it has not become part of his cultural identity. However, as an artist living in the post-modern era, he possesses the ability to interpret and understand Western history from the unique perspective of an Asian person. He has channeled this perspective into his art, creating collages that offer a fresh and thought-provoking take on Western tradition and humanity.
In his collage works, each element is nothing more than form and color, and there is no hierarchy among them. His collages reflect his own sense of being an outsider to the Korean, Japanese, and American cultures and their art scenes.
Gallery Talk
Date: April 17, 2023
Language: Japanese