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U49 I Yuichi Hirako
ART BASEL UNLIMITED 2026Venue: Messe BaselUnlimited Sector Opening (By invitation only): June 15VIP Days (By invitation only): June 16-17Public Days: June 18-21 -
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First unveiled in autumn 2025 at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, "Tree, Forest, Mountain" resonated deeply with audiences through its reinterpretation of the forest as not only a natural environment but also a site where mythology, community, and anonymity coexist. The densely aggregated hybrid figures generate a powerful physical presence, overwhelming the scale of the human body. In doing so, the work suggests a reversal of perspective: nature, long regarded as a passive and consumable object, emerges instead as an active subject that gazes back at humanity. Hirako presents coexistence not as an abstract ethical ideal, but as a spatial reality that already surrounds us, revealing both its latent possibilities and inherent imbalances.
Yuichi Hirako has developed a distinctive practice spanning painting, sculpture, and installation, creating landscapes imbued with both surreal imagination and ecological tension. Recurring throughout his work are hybrid beings that merge human and plant forms, functioning simultaneously as self-portraits and as metaphors for contemporary society. Through these figures, Hirako challenges anthropocentric worldviews and invites renewed reflection on the relationship between humans and the natural world. He currently lives and works in Tokyo.
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YUICHI HIRAKO (JAPAN, B. 1982)
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Yuichi Hirako has been exploring the coexistence and interdependent relationship between nature, flora, fauna, and humans with his styles full of metaphors and symbols. Through the hybrid character, he utilizes the diverse qualities of painting, sculpture and installation to create a three-dimensional representation of the unique themes behind his work.
Born and raised in Okayama Prefecture in Japan, a prefecture with a rich natural environment, he began to realize during his time at university in London that the main reason for urban green spaces and interior plants was to provide human comfort. He became conscious of the question of whether it was their fate to be transplanted into artificial places, subjected to basic growth controls, and then die out. He developed this into the central theme that underpins his work.
The central plot of his work is that a human-like character lives a nomadic existence in a forest on the other side of the world, living in symbiosis with other sub-features including cats and dogs. Deploying these characters plays a key role in multiplying the work's complex narrative, building detailed storylines that diverge in layers from the central theme. When the group of artists presenting character-based paintings is attracting considerable attention in this contemporary era, Hirako’s practice manages to obtain its singularity as he not only organically combines classical art with formal aesthetics and structural mechanism of the current media art but internalizes them.
Yuichi Hirako lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. He received a BFA from Wimbledon College of Art in London. He has held solo exhibitions at numerous museums, including Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art (2025), Keelung Museum of Art (2025), Nagi MOCA (2024), Hermès Hong Kong’s landmark Prince Store Flagship (2023), Space K Seoul (2023), Nerima Art Museum (2022) and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2018). While he has solo exhibitions with Gallery Baton since 2021, his work has been featured in exhibition in Long Museum (2024), Powerlong Museum (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2010), Ueno Royal Museum (2013), Museum of Modern Art, Gunma (2010) as well.His works are included in the collections of the Lisser Art Museum, the AkzoNovel Art Foundation, the Jean Pigozzi Collection, Space K Seoul and more.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2025
Origin, Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Okayama, JP
Beyond the Ideal Landscape, Keelung Museum of Art, Keelung, TW
2024
Ideal Landscape, Nagi MOCA, Okayama, JP
New Home, Gallery Baton, Seoul, KR2023
Journey, Space K, Seoul, KR
2022Inheritance, Metamorphosis, Rebirth, Nerima Art Museum, Tokyo, JP
2021
Mount Mariana, Gallery Baton, Seoul, KR
Selected CollectionsSpace K, KR
Parkseobo Foundation, KR
Lisser Art Museum (The Van den Broek Foundation), NL
Akzonovel Art Foundation, NL
Jean Pigozzi Collection, CH
The Dai-ichi Life Holding, Inc., JP
By Art Matters, CN
Modern Media, CN




