Iku Harada creates computerized virtual reality spaces, with houses and parks. She then creates scenes from that world in paint. There are trees and even a gallery with paintings exhibited. Even in her virtual world, the sun rises and shadows move with the passage of time. Harada replaces her computer-generated virtual image with a painted canvas, existing in a real world.

Harada is not uninterested in the real world, for her technique is yet more complex. She puts her physical paintings into a gallery space, not an actual gallery, but one constructed in a virtual world, and she then paints real scenes of her exhibitions. Once those scenes are hung on real walls in real spaces, painting suddenly starts to appear like a window again. The floors and walls drawn in paintings start resonating with the real floors and walls. The complexity is accelerated further when the original painting is hung next to its representation. One feels a certain distortion of space, or an extreme, three-dimensional trompe-l'œil.

The modern movable canvas or panel can be hung anywhere, and painting has lost its spatial rootedness. An interesting feature of Harada’s work, however, is the way she bridges the real and the virtual with a power that playfully dismantles that very system – that is, the long-venerated assumption of representational painting as showing a window onto somewhere non-existent. When a virtual window is drawn, exactly as a virtual window, as Harada does them, with intent to distort and twist, and intent to present her work in a real world, then painting can take on a new rootedness in site.