Hiraki Sawa
Born 1977 in Ishikawa, Japan
Lives and works in London, UK
In Hiraki Sawa’s evocative single- and multi-channel videos, the artist explores time, memory, migration, displacement, and his own position in the world. Incorporating animation and still shots in his work, he interweaves fantasy and reality, drawing heavily from his life experiences. His inspirations range from his memories of playing on a toy rocking horse as a child, to his fascination with airplanes, to his sense of living between two cultures and identities as a Japanese transplant to London. For him, the process of creating videos is way to manipulate time. In them, time alternates between speeding up, slowing down, expanding, and contracting, as the animals, objects, and tiny human figures that populate his pieces move in and out of the frame, often ranging across domestic spaces. “I just love time,” Sawa once said. “Controlling time is [a] really fascinating activity for me.” (ART SY)
OTA FINE ARTS
James Cohan Gallery
