{"id":238209,"date":"2025-10-25T01:36:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T01:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/238209\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T01:36:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T01:36:09","slug":"naotaka-hiro-pushes-his-body-to-its-limits-using-abstract-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/238209\/","title":{"rendered":"Naotaka Hiro Pushes His Body to Its Limits Using Abstract Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSeven years ago, Naotaka Hiro<\/a> was at the airport in Los Angeles when he received a harrowing text from his wife. \u201cThere\u2019s someone underneath the house,\u201d she wrote. \u201cSomeone\u2019s coughing.\u201d He abruptly canceled his flight to Japan and rushed home to his panicked spouse. Hiro ventured into the crawlspace beneath his home\u2014and found nobody there at all. Perhaps it was a racoon, he thought to himself. But then he noticed a blanket.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSomeone had been there,\u201d he told me recently, showing no sign that the memory induced any anxiety.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Aerial<\/p>\n

\n\tRather than fleeing in fear, as most might, Hiro stuck around, intrigued by the thought that this claustrophobic crawlspace had acted as someone\u2019s makeshift home. \u201cI was like, Wow, this is so uncomfortable,\u201d Hiro said. \u201cBut then, after 30 minutes, I was like, This must be okay. It was moist, quiet, and cold. I heard the sound of the other side: my dogs running around, my wife and son\u2019s voices.\u201d He compared the experience to being underneath the world.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis all provided the fodder for some of his recent paintings, which he produces by suspending his canvas just 13 inches above his body\u2014the exact height of the crawlspace of his LA home. Working alone in his studio, without the help of any assistants, Hiro lies supine and then proceeds to paint astonishing abstractions. Filled with forms variously resembling green plants, silvery fish gills, and necrotic veins, these paintings are part of Hiro\u2019s ongoing quest to make sense of what goes on inside himself. \u201cMy body is always in contact with the surface,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tHiro\u2019s latest creations\u2014on view at Bortolami<\/a> gallery in New York through November 1\u2014are not abstract paintings in the conventional sense. As with many of his recent works, the canvases are not stretched or mounted on an easel during their production. Instead, he often slices holes through his canvases and puts his body through these apertures, essentially allowing him to be in his paintings as he is making them. Most of the works in this show also have ropes attached; Hiro used them to wrap the canvas around himself, affording him the ability to paint not just the areas in front of himself, but also in the spaces behind, to his sides, and all around.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tNaotaka Hiro with his 2025 painting Untitled (Solvent).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tChristopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews<\/p>\n

\n\tHe pointed to Untitled (Solvent), a 2025 painting made via that method. Its borders are threaded with purplish ropes that run off the canvas and onto the floor beneath, where they collect in loops. \u201cThis one is kind of like a 360-degree body scanner,\u201d he said, smiling.<\/p>\n

\n\tHiro\u2019s art functions on an unconventional wavelength, which may explain why he\u2019s developed a cult reputation in LA, the city where he has been based since 1991. The artist, who once served as a studio assistant to Paul McCarthy, has appeared there in shows organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian, as well as in Made in L.A., the vaunted biennial run by the Hammer Museum.<\/p>\n

\n\tGradually, his work has risen in prominence outside LA, too. In 2024, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hung a recently acquired work by Hiro in its galleries alongside a painting by Joan Mitchell. Right now, Hiro\u2019s work can be found in Roppongi Crossing, a recurring survey of Japanese contemporary art put on by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Misako & Rosen, the Tokyo-based gallery that has been showing Hiro since 2007, brought his work this week to Art Basel Paris.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong Hiro\u2019s fans is Koki Tanaka, the acclaimed Japanese artist who showed alongside Hiro early in his career. Tanaka said he remained impressed by the way that Hiro uses his art as a form of self-exploration. \u201cHe\u2019s using his body to understand his body,\u201d Tanaka said.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tNaotaka Hiro, Sandwaves, Internally, Volume 1, 2025.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy the artist and Bortolami<\/p>\n

\n\tHiro\u2019s beginnings were in film, not art. He was born in Osaka in 1972 and came to the US at age 18, barely able to speak English. He\u2019d arrived in California with the intention of becoming a filmmaker, but, he recalled, \u201cI didn\u2019t have the courage to ask people to collaborate with me.\u201d Feeling too modest to bring on actors and crew members, Hiro decided to go it alone.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe said he prized the sense, in his early solo productions, that \u201cyou don\u2019t know what\u2019s what anymore. Maybe I\u2019m a performer or a director.\u201d Moreover, he was interested in the twinned notions of \u201ccontrol and being controlled, seeing and being seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHiro was already storyboarding his films, as most filmmakers do. But soon, these preparatory drawings became props in his movies. That\u2019s when he realized he might have been an artist all along. \u201cYou know, I never really wanted to become a painter,\u201d he said. (This, despite the fact that Hiro has a B.A. in art from the University of California, Los Angeles; he later received his M.F.A. from CalArts.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe artist\u2019s first mature works owed something to McCarthy, the sculptor who served as Hiro\u2019s undergraduate professor and later acted as his employer. Like McCarthy, Hiro seemed oddly enchanted by bodily functions that some might find disgusting. One video even featured close-up shots of him peeing, with his penis superimposed twice over, as a metaphor for the hands of a clock. Other works alluded to vomiting and defecation, acts that have also shown up in McCarthy\u2019s abject art.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn one of the earliest profiles of Hiro, from 2007, curator Catherine Taft claimed that these works were influenced by Gutai, a Japanese avant-garde movement from the postwar era. The comparison has stuck, showing up repeatedly in reviews of Hiro\u2019s art since then. It makes sense, in a way: Kazuo Shiraga, one of the leading Gutai artists, created a legendary 1955 performance called Challenging Mud<\/a>, whose titular substance he smeared around with his hands. Works like that one have a distinctly corporeal quality, much as Hiro\u2019s do; Shiraga was also from Osaka, just like Hiro. But Hiro told me that McCarthy introduced him to Gutai, which he never heard about while living in Japan.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, just like the Gutai artists, Hiro treats his paintings as something akin to performances. Of his art\u2019s ties to Gutai, he had to concede: \u201cMaybe there is a connection.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tNaotaka Hiro with his 2025 Bortolami show.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tChristopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews<\/p>\n

\n\tFor some of his recent works, Hiro painted according to strict rules that were dictated in advance. To make them, he said, \u201cI set the timer for one hour or two hours. Within that time, I do this movement. Then I stop, and I go back to the same position, and I do it again. I call them sessions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThen he put it another way: \u201cI make a rule. I work within the rule. Then I break it.\u201d He compared his working method to that of Bruce Nauman, an artist whose works have sometimes begun with simple gestures\u2014sidling back and forth down an empty hallway, as he did for one 1968 piece called Walk with Contrapposto\u2014that grow increasingly erratic as they are enacted over and over.<\/p>\n

\n\tHiro has rarely been so forthcoming about his own works, which he sometimes paints according to codes that are not readily disclosed to viewers. (One such code utilized in the Bortolami works included relating Hiro\u2019s movements to different colors\u2014red, yellow, and blue in one, just like \u201cold video cables,\u201d he said.) I told Hiro his art seemed closed off, as though there was a lot he didn\u2019t want people to know about how he used his body in his art. Was he ever tempted to film himself producing his paintings? \u201cI didn\u2019t want to show the process that way, because it\u2019s all here,\u201d he said, alluding to the works all around him when we spoke at Bortolami.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet Hiro\u2019s body has appeared more visibly in a recent series of casts depicting his own form. In one featured in the Bortolami show, the bronze mimics Hiro\u2019s face before descending down his wrinkled stomach and culminating in his folded legs, with one armless hand depicted resting on a bent knee. They\u2019re made by pouring wax across his body, then sitting still for about two hours to let it dry and casting it in bronze. He called the process \u201csuper uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tNaotaka Hiro, Plot, Rerouted, 2025.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy the artist and Bortolami<\/p>\n

\n\tHiro has been making similar casts for quite a while. Before the pandemic, Hiro said, \u201cI wanted to hide my face, because I was interested in anonymity and the body by itself.\u201d But after falling ill with Covid in 2020, and with Asian Americans facing a rise in hate crimes against their community in the years after, Hiro knew he had to reveal himself in full.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe sculptures are not idealized: they nakedly display Hiro\u2019s sagging flesh and blemishes. They are \u201calways imperfect,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of how I see my body.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCorrection, 10\/24\/25, 5:35 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated where Hiro earned his M.F.A. It was CalArts, not UCLA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seven years ago, Naotaka Hiro was at the airport in Los Angeles when he received a harrowing text…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,112376,49,48,356,75,112377],"class_list":{"0":"post-238209","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-bortolami","12":"tag-ca","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-naotaka-hiro"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}