Yuichi Hirako is a Japanese contemporary artist best known for his dreamlike paintings and sculptures that explore the delicate and sometimes confusing relationship between humans and nature. Born in Okayama Prefecture in 1982, Hirako moved to the UK in 1999 to study at Wimbledon College of Art, where he graduated in 2006. Now based in Tokyo, his career has taken him across the world, with solo shows at the Nerima Art Museum (Tokyo, 2022), Space K (Seoul, 2023), and the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art (Okayama, 2024). He’s also created permanent installations for the Okayama Art Creation Theater Harenowa and Hermès Landmark Prince’s in Hong Kong, it’s a proof of how far his art has traveled, both literally and conceptually.
In Hirako’s uncanny world, the relationship between people, plants, and architecture unfolds in vibrant color and surreal proportion. His large-scale sculptures, paintings, and installations are often crowded with domestic objects, food, cats, and anonymous figures whose faces are obscured by cartoonish head coverings resembling trees or antlers. Visual metaphors for our merging with nature.
His expansive solo exhibition, ORIGIN, at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art marks his first large-scale solo presentation in his home prefecture. Inviting visitors into a surreal, almost Alice in Wonderland-like realm, the exhibition transforms not only the museum’s indoor galleries but also its courtyard and plaza. From salon-style hangings of numerous paintings and sculptures along undulating plywood surfaces to a monumental four-part canvas, Hirako’s works distort perception and spark curiosity.
Recurring, faceless characters populate these dreamlike settings, a lavish table brimming with fruit, bread, books, cats, and flowers, or a towering bookshelf where trees grow beyond their frames, blurring the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Presented as part of the Setouchi Triennale, ORIGIN captures Hirako’s poetic vision of coexistence and continues through November 9 in Okayama City.
Blurring Nature and Artifice: The Botanical Series
One of his best-known series, the Botanical Series, grew out of his time in London. Surrounded by carefully designed gardens, manicured parks, and balcony plants, Hirako became fascinated by the way city dwellers created their own “artificial nature.” It stood in sharp contrast to his upbringing in Okayama, where he spent his childhood in real forests and hills—immersed in what he calls “nature-made natural environments.” The series merges these two worlds, layering the wildness of the forest with delicate man-made objects like books, vases, potted plants, and wooden boats
Across his work, Hirako’s forests are never just landscapes, they’re mirrors. Through them, he asks us to reconsider our relationship with the world around us, and to find beauty in the spaces where nature and humanity quietly intertwine.