Demise Hisao Exhibition
-- Book Art --

January 7 (Sat) - 29 (Sun), 2023

Wednesday - Sunday: 11：00 - 17：00
Last day of the exhibition: 11：00 - 16：00

Closed: Monday and Tuesday

Artists' Visits to the GalleryMr. Demise will be at the gallery for this exhibition as follows. Please feel free to ask him about the various difficulties he encountered in creating his works, his aims for his works, etc., and enjoy a pleasant time together.
January 7 (Sat) from 3:00 p.m.
January 8 (Sun) 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Press Release / Demise Hisao Exhibition

Artland Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Demise Hisao, a photographer who is dedicated to analog photography and uses his own developed techniques, to be held from January 7 (Sat) to 29 (Sun), 2023. Mr. Demise is currently based in Tokyo.

Demise was born in Fukui Prefecture in 1957. After graduating from high school, he studied at the Academia Nacional Circlo Bezillas Artes in Spain, and began his solo exhibition activities in 1975. Initially, he developed oil paintings, but in 1985, based on his experience working in a professional lab, he began cutting and pasting self-taken images to create materials, reconstructing them into symmetrical vertical and horizontal forms, pasting them onto the screen, and applying color finishing using photographic dyes. He then places a glass bead in front of the lens and shoots the image, a method he has developed independently.

His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Japan and has won many awards in public competitions. In 1990, he won the Grand Prize at the Emba Art Award Exhibition (Emba Museum of Modern Art, China), which competes for the creation of new art, and in 2000, he won the Mainichi Contemporary Art Award (two-dimensional division) at the Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, etc.). In 2007, he was nominated for the Ryohei Koiso Grand Prize, one of the top public competitions in Japan for painting.

In his first solo exhibition at the gallery in 1997, he introduced his "private landscapes" with a surrealistic atmosphere based on the theme of mental landscapes, and in his solo exhibition in 2010, he presented miniature works incorporating small three-dimensional objects such as toys, pebbles, and coins in the frame with his "private landscape" photographs.

In this solo exhibition, he has made a complete turnaround and developed book art. He himself describes this work as "I found a box that looked like an old book a few years ago and made it into box art, which turned into book art.
In a sense, it is safe to call it a "personal landscape" in a new dimension that combines his consistent use of self-photography and materials he has collected with his own eyes as materials. Please enjoy four new two-dimensional photographs and more than 40 pieces of book art.

The artist will be in the gallery on the first day of the exhibition, so please feel free to ask him about the difficulties he had in creating his works, his aims for his works, etc., and enjoy a pleasant time together.


Artist's presence: January 6 (Sat.) and 7 (Sun.)

Demise Hisao Text

I love to paint.
It has continued since I can remember, even up to my present age of 77.
What is your purpose in life? When asked, "To die a good death."
Human beings are complicated creatures with complex and contradictory minds.
I create my works with the hope that I will enjoy the complexity of human life and meet my final days.

The definition of my photo collage is as the Muldaur song says
＜It is as beautiful as the encounter between a sewing machine on a dissecting table and a bat umbrella. The relationship between two things that have no relation to each other, meeting in a certain space, on a certain plane, and creating a mysterious meaning.
The relationship between two things that have no relationship to each other but meet in a certain space or plane and create a mysterious meaning is just like life.
At the age of 29, he picked up a camera and began photographing objects that caught his eye as a painter, using as many rolls of film as he could find.
The black-and-white prints from these films are overflowing out of the storage box, and I can't even keep them in order.

A few years ago, I found a box that looked like an old book, and I started to make it into a box art, which is a book art.
Since it is in the form of a book, I can make collages and assemblages on three sides. I use images and cuts from my most memorable old and recent works. I also incorporate small stones, beads, and figurines that seem insignificant. I have departed from the title of the book, and enjoy the fun of combining various objects that come together by chance.

These screens can be seen as a collage of my life.
I hope that you will find your own unique way of seeing, feeling, resonating with, and interpreting this personal play. 　 　
Autumn, 2022