HIRAKI SAWA

Born 1977 in Ishikawa, Japan. Lives and works in London, England.

Hiraki Sawa, out of the blue, 2008 (video still), two-channel synchronised video, black-and-white, stereo, 13:20 mins, sound performed by Tenniscoats and Tetsuya Umeda; sound edited by Dale Berning. Courtesy the artist; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo; and James Cohan Gallery, New York. This project was made possible with assistance from Ishibashi Foundation.

Hiraki Sawa studied Fine Arts at the University of East London, completing his Masters in Sculpture in 2003. Sawa has since exhibited his video animation and film work widely, heralded for his transformative dreamscapes that brim with fantastic creatures amidst banal domestic scenes of bathroom sinks and kitchenettes. Influenced by his background in sculpture, the artist cites that he approaches the video image in the same way as the tangible object.

In his seminal work, a grainy black-and-white film titled Dwelling (2002), the artist superimposed animated images over a series of still shots. Sawa transformed his own understated apartment into an imagined international airport, complete with toy aeroplanes crisscrossing the ‘flight zone’ of his living room, landing on his modest kitchen table and taking off again to skim the edges of the bathtub, refrigerator and bed. The work contemplates serious issues of movement and migration, and concomitant feelings of alienation, melancholy and loss, using a playful and childlike framework. A number of Sawa’s earlier works refer to travel – by plane, boat, foot or beast of burden – and perhaps this is a reflection of his own rootlessness as a foreigner in London. Going Places Sitting Down (2004) alludes directly to this, as well as to the imagination of the ‘armchair traveler’. The mood, however, quickly escalates from an initial sense of fantasy to entering the more disorientating territory of the alienated, surreal or absurd. In this, the artist’s first large-scale, three-channel video projection, the recurring motif is a small rocking horse set in an English country home. Across three channels, miniature horses move rhythmically and eerily across the domestic landscape, traversing a sheepskin rug that appears as a snow-covered terrain, and a wooden dining table that melts and flows like a chocolate river. In accompanying films, tiny naked figures and animals drawn from the images of nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge similarly inhabit this quintessentially English home. In an Alice in Wonderland reversal of scale, the effect is voyeuristic, surreal and powerfully imaginative –they become a place of wonder and delight.

In increasingly meditative installations, Sawa has established an approach towards image making that may be best described as a ‘Collage of Reflections’. In this, he superimposes one layer of reality on to another, sometimes, as in eight minutes (2005), showing many scenes (and screens) within a single channel. By reversing expected relationships and hierarchies between people, animals and objects, he creates a series of meditative or reflective spaces that telescope the miniature with the infinite to subvert any idea of objective reality.

In more recent installations, Sawa has created a syncopated, dream-like universe in which, like rocks in a classical Japanese garden, the images create an aura of meditative timelessness. Here, he has started to move away from the ‘cast list’ of animated aeroplanes, domestic utensils, rocking horses, goats, camels, even elephants, that populated earlier works to think on a more cosmic scale.

Sawa changes scenery with his open-air video work Unseen Park (2006). Presented in colour and accompanied by a soundtrack of music-box tunes, the surrealist landscape of an isolated theme park is brought to life by a series of fantastic makeshift paper-folded creatures, ridden atop by young children – a miniature world viewed at ground level against a blurred backdrop that shows a Big Wheel and array of theme park rides that stand motionless. The crafted creatures and small children journey to the sea, prancing over water in the evening under simulated fireworks and low-hanging planets, and finally arrive at the shoreline at dawn, where they dance over rocks and in the waves. The spiral, rocking, unending movements of the characters in this story present yet another whimsical, dreamlike, boundless journey – this time belonging to children.

Interviewed in 2008, Sawa described his work as follows: ‘Fundamentally my videos are all ambiguous fabrications. As neither a documentary film-maker nor a photographer, I tend to be in limbo to start with, and insert lies in each piece as I go along. And when I say “lies”, I don’t mean throwing in dramatic falsehoods, but finding ingenious ways to make things seem as real as possible.’

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2006 ‘Hiraki Sawa, Certain Places’, Firstsite, Colchester, UK
2006 ‘Hiraki Sawa – Six Good Reasons to Stay At Home’, National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
2007 ‘Hiraki Sawa – Hako’, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK

Selected Group Exhibitions

2005 ‘Art Circus: Jumping from the Ordinary’, 2nd Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan
2005 ‘Fusion: Aspects of Asian Culture in the MUSAC Collection’, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Castilla y León, Spain
2008 ‘Love and Politics, in a Minor Key’, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey
2009 ‘Mind as Passion’, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
2009 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6), Brisbane, Australia

Selected Bibliography

David Elliott, ‘100 Video Artists: Hiraki Sawa’, Exit Book, Exit Publications, Madrid, 2009
Alex Farquharson, ‘In Between Days’, Hiraki Sawa, exhibition catalogue, Firstsite, Colchester, 2006, pp. 67–73
Mitsue Nagaya, ‘Thoughts on Hako’, ARTIST FILE 2008, exhibition catalogue, 005 National Art Center, Tokyo, 2008, pp. 2–7
Jennifer Thatcher, ‘THE SANDMAN ’, Hiraki Sawa Hako, exhibition catalogue, Centro de Arte Caja Burgos, Burgos, 2008, pp. 8–17