NANZUKA is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of new works by Kanagawa-born artist Hiroki Tsukuda, his first solo exhibition to take place in Japan in five years.

Hiroki Tsukuda was born in Kagawa in 1978, graduated from the Department of Imaging Arts & Sciences at Musashino Art University, and has had two solo exhibitions at NANZUKA in 2007 and 2009. Since 2011, he has mainly shown his work in Europe, including solo exhibitions New drawings, my journey and some memories (Ten Haaf Projects, Amsterdam) and New Tokyo (Galerie Lena Brüning, Berlin) and group exhibition Flying (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin), building an international reputation.

Tsukuda’s works make use of many common motifs such as cityscapes and architecture and the natural landscapes of woods and waterfronts while simultaneously incorporating drawn geometric planes and symbolic elements. At a previous exhibition Tsukuda remarked, “I don’t know whether I am creating an imaginary world from the landscapes that I have been observing on an unconscious level, or whether the world in my imagination just suddenly appears before my eyes, but I’m trying to express, as memories, those fragmented landscapes that are engraved within me.” True to his word, Tsukuda’s works reveal a perspective of the world in which reality and the unrealistic coexist.

An important component impossible to overlook in understanding Tsukuda’s work is the influence of the science fiction movies, video games, comics, music, and novels Tsukuda grew up with. In his explanation of his works as the “outer world” we can perceive the divergence between the futuristic tomorrow that Tsukuda believed in at a young age, and the reality of living in that future today. The neo-futuristic worldview in Tsukuda’s works is perhaps born from an alternate “reality” composed of the complex mash-up of images he has scanned from the real world and the information he has stored from the various mediums that have influenced him.

Tsukuda has researched and committed to memory the surreal occurrences that lurk within regular day-to-day life. For instance, cases where a relative relationship changes the meaning of a thing, for example a gigantic building that appears suddenly amidst an untamed, natural setting, have become an important source of imagery in Tsukuda’s ongoing investigation of the theme of reconstructing pluralistic visual perceptions and cogitations. For the upcoming exhibition, Tsukuda embarks on a new mode of exploration with installation, taking the images he has to this point embodied mainly within two-dimensional works and retranslating them in three dimensions.

Regarding the upcoming exhibition, Tsukuda comments: “By investigating the sense of spirituality that comes from the feelings of strangeness and affinity born from the physical relationship between objects and shapes, I hope that the viewer will get a foretaste of an alternate world that opens out from there.”

There will be an opening reception with the artist in attendance starting at 18:00 on January 11, 2014.