Noritoshi Hirakawa
“Transcending Relativity”
July 23 – August 27, 2011
(The gallery will be closed for summer : August 14 – 22)
Open: 11:00 – 18:00
http://www.wako-art.jp/top_en.php
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Noritoshi Hirakawa was born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1960, and has been based in New York since 1993. For over 20 years, Hirakawa has been conducting extensive social fieldwork in many parts of the world, and has shown his works in more than 300 exhibitions. His works, varying in medium from photography, video, sound work, text, performance to film, have dealt with wide-ranging and challenging themes from physicality, gender, mass media, religion to contemporary art itself. Varying as they may be, however, at the core lays his agenda of unrelenting questioning and issuing proposals to institutionalized concepts such as the social system and the individual, and the individual and its free will.
Since the earthquake in Northeast Japan earlier this year, there has been a change in the understanding of the relationship between art and society, and a more active debate on what the role of art is today has emerged. The renewed interest in the artist’s Hamaoka nuclear power plant series In Reminiscence of the Sea from 2007 can be seen as being part of this change. How should man question the society, and advance forward? What is the Self, the social system, free will and Art?
On view in this exhibition will be new photographs and installation pieces that Hirakawa has selected, with the current situation in Japan in mind, to question the audience and to insist changing the way we take things for granted; also on view will be his work from 1997 that deal with “people’s minds”, for which he took up ad spaces in Artforum magazine. Through this exhibition, Hirakawa calls out for people to rediscover their fundamental “absolute reality”, and to transcend the world established by superficial relationships based on dichotomies, duality, and opposites.