Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Takashi Hara, b. 1983 Tokyo, Japan
Takashi Hara first understudied the prominent artist Koshin Soeda in Japanese calligraphy in Tokyo and later graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Double Major inPainting and Ceramics at the University of Regina, Canada and a Master of Fine Artsin Ceramics at the Arizona State University in 2015. Having successfully produced anumber of exhibitions, commercial projects and artist in residencies internationally henow lives and works in his home City Tokyo.
Born in 1983 in Tokyo, a city witnessing the birth of the Gutaï movement, being the counterpart of the C.O.B.R.A. movement (Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, the hometown of the painter Willem de Kooning), Takashi Hara has been delving into a universe around the figure of the pig for some years.
"I got the initial inspiration when I visited Chiran Peace Museum (for Kamikaze Pilots during WWII) to research what and how those teenagers had to go through the whole training and their very last mission. Simply put, I was moved by one photo that has 3 pilots smiling and encouraging each other 5mins before they took off to Hawaii. Not that I'm trying to bring anti-war thing into my art, but I just couldn't refuse this inspiration towards my little pigs. I didn't like the idea of making them in a commercial product like way". Takashi Hara
In 2019, A2Z Art gallery presented two solo exhibitions in both Paris and Hong Kong of the series Pig Nation - A story of humanity and are planning to exhibit other series by the artist in the near future.
