AKIHIRO HASEGAWA (長谷川 彰宏)

Spanning two floors, from the basement to the 1st floor of the gallery, the exhibition will introduce various works drawn from personal experiences, from a series formed by Hasegawa’s encounters with faith, to portraits that address ideas of human existence.

Born into a family-run Tendai sect temple, Hasegawa underwent training in Mt. Hiei. Shaped by these unique attitudes towards life, death, and humanity’s very existence, Hasegawa’s works take a wide-angled approach to the nature and existence of emotions, thoughts, matter, and life, and offer a glimpse of the artist’s unique perspectives gained through his experience with the Buddhist priesthood. Set to be on exhibit, Repentance, Raigō, Prayer, or the Horizon (2022, previously exhibited at KUMA Exhibition 2022) presents chimeric, distorted figures reminiscent of Buddhist priests in vibrant hues. Painted recto-verso on acrylic board, the work sublimates, both, the gap and connection between this world and the next. On the other hand, the ‘life’ these figures depict illustrates the expectations humanity holds in the face of its bilateral nature, life’s strength and danger, and the relativity of existence.

As an increasingly digitalised, ‘conceptual’ society of the present succeeds its feudalistic, ‘materialist’ past, the prophetic nature of Hasegawa’s work, in many ways, offers a vision that urges viewers to reconsider their view of the future.

On the exhibition title, Yomogi & COMP

There is a complete meal supplement called COMP. Apparently, you can survive off just eating that.

On the other hand, there is yomogi.¹

–Although Yomogi grows just about everywhere, we don’t really eat it. It’s probably just about yomogi rice cakes that we’d eat.

Frankly, you wouldn’t eat it for its nutritional value, but more for its flavouring and colouring of rice cakes.

In other words, COMP is consumed for the purpose of ‘nourishment’, while yomogi is eaten for its ‘aesthetic and flavour’.

I believe the ways in which we look and behave in the world, very much resemble these two ideas.

I see COMP as understanding, while yomogi as ‘zatsumi’ (miscellaneous, unnecessary flavours) and ‘nebulous’.

I believe feelings of ‘realisation’ and ‘contentment’ occur when these two concepts overlap.

We, humans, live to feel content.

These are the eyes with which I view art.

＊Yomogi & COMP is a concept my friend, Takatoshi Yoshida, and I came up with.

– Akihiro Hasegawa