Represented

Satoshi Hashimoto橋本聡

Born in Tokyo, 1977. Lives and works in Tokyo. Completed the B-Semi Schooling System of Contemporary Art, Yokohama, in 2000. Hashimoto has created a lot of art through which he involves the viewers and questions their role in the experience of art appreciation, in the form of performances, actions, and instructions aimed at inducing the viewers' own reactions. Many of his works have taken the form of instructions made up of short sentences, based on the fact that things we have around us for daily use have hidden instructions to choreograph people — for example, chairs say to us, "you can sit" or "sit." In his work, Hashimoto has thrown light on such intrinsic choreographies that direct people at the unconscious level, presenting to the viewer various alternative, subversive possibilities. Installed in a public space, instructions like "Paint Yourself" and "You Can Hammer Yourself" do not only render the reader into the agent of the action in question but also their private territory, namely their body, into the target to apply the paint and destruct with the hammer, respectively, re-questioning the boundary between the public and private. Beyond those instructions regarding objects in our immediate surroundings, Hashimoto's gaze extends to the dynamics of economy and politics as well as the scales of meteorological and astronomical phenomena.

Works