Naotaka Hiro Pushes His Body to Its Limits Using Abstract Painting

Seven years in the past, Naotaka Hiro was on the airport in Los Angeles when he acquired a harrowing textual content from his spouse. “There’s somebody beneath the home,” she wrote. “Somebody’s coughing.” He abruptly canceled his flight to Japan and rushed house to his panicked partner. Hiro ventured into the crawlspace beneath his house—and located no one there in any respect. Maybe it was a racoon, he thought to himself. However then he observed a blanket.

“Somebody had been there,” he informed me not too long ago, exhibiting no signal that the reminiscence induced any anxiousness.

Somewhat than fleeing in concern, as most may, Hiro caught round, intrigued by the thought that this claustrophobic crawlspace had acted as somebody’s makeshift house. “I used to be like, Wow, that is so uncomfortable,” Hiro mentioned. “However then, after half-hour, I used to be like, This have to be okay. It was moist, quiet, and chilly. I heard the sound of the opposite facet: my canines operating round, my spouse and son’s voices.” He in contrast the expertise to being beneath the world.

This all supplied the fodder for a few of his latest work, which he produces by suspending his canvas simply 13 inches above his physique—the precise top of the crawlspace of his LA house. Working alone in his studio, with out the assistance of any assistants, Hiro lies supine after which proceeds to color astonishing abstractions. Full of kinds variously resembling inexperienced vegetation, silvery fish gills, and necrotic veins, these work are a part of Hiro’s ongoing quest to make sense of what goes on inside himself. “My physique is all the time involved with the floor,” he mentioned.

Hiro’s newest creations—on view at Bortolami gallery in New York by means of November 1—will not be summary work within the standard sense. As with a lot of his latest works, the canvases will not be stretched or mounted on an easel throughout their manufacturing. As a substitute, he usually slices holes by means of his canvases and places his physique by means of these apertures, primarily permitting him to be in his work as he’s making them. A lot of the works on this present even have ropes connected; Hiro used them to wrap the canvas round himself, affording him the flexibility to color not simply the areas in entrance of himself, but in addition within the areas behind, to his sides, and throughout.

He pointed to Untitled (Solvent), a 2025 portray made through that methodology. Its borders are threaded with purplish ropes that run off the canvas and onto the ground beneath, the place they gather in loops. “This one is type of like a 360-degree physique scanner,” he mentioned, smiling.

Hiro’s artwork features on an unconventional wavelength, which can clarify why he’s developed a cult repute in LA, town the place he has been based mostly since 1991. The artist, who as soon as served as a studio assistant to Paul McCarthy, has appeared there in reveals organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian, in addition to in Made in L.A., the vaunted biennial run by the Hammer Museum.

Step by step, his work has risen in prominence outdoors LA, too. In 2024, the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York hung a not too long ago acquired work by Hiro in its galleries alongside a portray by Joan Mitchell. Proper now, Hiro’s work will be present in Roppongi Crossing, a recurring survey of Japanese modern artwork placed on by the Mori Artwork Museum in Tokyo. Misako & Rosen, the Tokyo-based gallery that has been exhibiting Hiro since 2007, introduced his work this week to Artwork Basel Paris.

Amongst Hiro’s followers is Koki Tanaka, the acclaimed Japanese artist who confirmed alongside Hiro early in his profession. Tanaka mentioned he remained impressed by the best way that Hiro makes use of his artwork as a type of self-exploration. “He’s utilizing his physique to perceive his physique,” Tanaka mentioned.

Hiro’s beginnings had been in movie, not artwork. He was born in Osaka in 1972 and got here to the US at age 18, barely in a position to communicate English. He’d arrived in California with the intention of changing into a filmmaker, however, he recalled, “I didn’t have the braveness to ask folks to collaborate with me.” Feeling too modest to deliver on actors and crew members, Hiro determined to go it alone.

He mentioned he prized the sense, in his early solo productions, that “you don’t know what’s what anymore. Possibly I’m a performer or a director.” Furthermore, he was within the twinned notions of “management and being managed, seeing and being seen.”

Hiro was already storyboarding his movies, as most filmmakers do. However quickly, these preparatory drawings turned props in his films. That’s when he realized he may need been an artist all alongside. “You recognize, I by no means actually needed to develop into a painter,” he mentioned. (This, although Hiro has a B.A. in artwork from the College of California, Los Angeles; he later acquired his M.F.A. from CalArts.)

The artist’s first mature works owed one thing to McCarthy, the sculptor who served as Hiro’s undergraduate professor and later acted as his employer. Like McCarthy, Hiro appeared oddly enchanted by bodily features that some may discover disgusting. One video even featured close-up pictures of him peeing, along with his penis superimposed twice over, as a metaphor for the arms of a clock. Different works alluded to vomiting and defecation, acts which have additionally proven up in McCarthy’s abject artwork.

In one of many earliest profiles of Hiro, from 2007, curator Catherine Taft claimed that these works had been influenced by Gutai, a Japanese avant-garde motion from the postwar period. The comparability has caught, exhibiting up repeatedly in opinions of Hiro’s artwork since then. It is sensible, in a approach: Kazuo Shiraga, one of many main Gutai artists, created a legendary 1955 efficiency referred to as Challenging Mud, whose titular substance he smeared round along with his arms. Works like that one have a distinctly corporeal high quality, a lot as Hiro’s do; Shiraga was additionally from Osaka, similar to Hiro. However Hiro informed me that McCarthy launched him to Gutai, which he by no means heard about whereas dwelling in Japan.

Nonetheless, similar to the Gutai artists, Hiro treats his work as one thing akin to performances. Of his artwork’s ties to Gutai, he needed to concede: “Possibly there’s a connection.”

For a few of his latest works, Hiro painted in line with strict guidelines that had been dictated upfront. To make them, he mentioned, “I set the timer for one hour or two hours. Inside that point, I do that motion. Then I cease, and I am going again to the identical place, and I do it once more. I name them periods.”

Then he put it one other approach: “I make a rule. I work throughout the rule. Then I break it.” He in contrast his working methodology to that of Bruce Nauman, an artist whose works have generally begun with easy gestures—sidling forwards and backwards down an empty hallway, as he did for one 1968 piece referred to as Stroll with Contrapposto—that develop more and more erratic as they’re enacted again and again.

Hiro has not often been so forthcoming about his personal works, which he generally paints in line with codes that aren’t readily disclosed to viewers. (One such code utilized within the Bortolami works included relating Hiro’s actions to totally different colours—crimson, yellow, and blue in a single, similar to “previous video cables,” he mentioned.) I informed Hiro his artwork appeared closed off, as if there was quite a bit he didn’t need folks to find out about how he used his physique in his artwork. Was he ever tempted to movie himself producing his work? “I didn’t wish to present the method that approach, as a result of it’s all right here,” he mentioned, alluding to the works throughout him after we spoke at Bortolami.

But Hiro’s physique has appeared extra visibly in a latest collection of casts depicting his personal type. In a single featured within the Bortolami present, the bronze mimics Hiro’s face earlier than descending down his wrinkled abdomen and culminating in his folded legs, with one armless hand depicted resting on a bent knee. They’re made by pouring wax throughout his physique, then sitting nonetheless for about two hours to let it dry and casting it in bronze. He referred to as the method “tremendous uncomfortable.”

Hiro has been making related casts for fairly some time. Earlier than the pandemic, Hiro mentioned, “I needed to cover my face, as a result of I used to be fascinated about anonymity and the physique by itself.” However after falling sick with Covid in 2020, and with Asian Individuals dealing with an increase in hate crimes in opposition to their neighborhood within the years after, Hiro knew he needed to reveal himself in full.

The sculptures will not be idealized: they nakedly show Hiro’s sagging flesh and blemishes. They’re “all the time imperfect,” he mentioned. “That’s type of how I see my physique.”

Correction, 10/24/25, 5:35 p.m.: A earlier model of this text misstated the place Hiro earned his M.F.A. It was CalArts, not UCLA.