Satoshi HASHIMOTO : The World's Three Major Round Things: the Sun, the Moon, the Eye

2016 (2011), spray can, instructions, visitors. Visitors can paint their own body As the New Year’s first event, we will hold an exhibition of the work of Satoshi Hashimoto. This is his first solo exhibition at our gallery in four years since “I was Leonardo da Vinci. I sell my soul. I sell heaven.” (2013). 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. His sometimes unreasonable instructions and his actions that freely transcend any borders, pose a question to our principle of existence. We usually think, speak, and act as if these actions are entirely of our own free will while, in fact, these behaviors are fundamentally influenced by someone or something. Upon finding the shadows, i.e., a false state of people dressed in borrowed plumes, Hashimoto kidnaps them and asks a question while sitting at their side: “Now you are my hostage. And your guardian is your true self.” “The weight scale placed in the gallery is not the object of your vision. Conversely, that scale objectifies your mass. The mass of the Earth is 5.972 x 10 24 kg. Your body weight is included in that value. But that proportion is extremely low. The world is almost entirely composed of things other than you. But we actually perceive the world in more complex way.” (“Satoshi Hashimoto: Everything and Others,” text by Katsumasa Matsui) “Pie Charts: Everything and Others” is an artwork which transcendentally expresses diverse segmentations of the world through the medium of pie charts. For instance, there are statistical data which indicate an economic discrepancy where the ‘gross assets of 1% of the world population’ almost equals the ‘gross assets of 99% of the world population.’ In this artwork, a pie chart that schematizes the data is aligned horizontally with a pie chart which indicates that ‘the moon observed from the earth’ is almost as large as ‘the sun observed from the earth.’ In fact, the sun is almost 400 times bigger than the moon (and almost 27,000,000 times larger in mass). Various things which are not normally associative with each other, such as the combination of economical data and astronomical data, are put into comparison. Further, various concepts that are not normally expressed by pie chart are schematized and juxtaposed to other statistical data. This chain of confrontation causes a crack on each segmentation of the world. In this exhibition, “Pie Charts: Everything and Others” which was created through research in 2013 at Kunisaki peninsula and on Japanese philosopher Baien Miura and was exhibited through an online exhibition “Kunisaki Genzo” (Direction: Mizuki Endo) will be exhibited, through the medium of aluminum plates. During the term, several performances and events will be held every week, in association with his concept “Abstract Direct Action” expressed in exhibitions such as “MOT Annual 2016: Loose Lips Save Ships” (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo) and with his other themes. Details will be announced through our website and SNS. Born in 1977.