About Youki Hirakawa (平川祐樹 )
About Youki Hirakawa
Japanese based-artist Youki Hirakawa. His works combine oriental Zen philosophy with occidental pluralistic art style, demonstrating his cross-cultural creative thinking. The omnipresent yet invisible “time” dominates over everything, while tangible things are destined to demise. Hirakawa is fascinated by such irreversibility, wishing to stop time from elapsing by sealing it in his artworks.
Hirakawa received rigorous training in film production, which contributed substantially to his proficiency in embodying time with images. He attempts to unveil and liberate the intangible time hidden behind objects, events and spaces, thereby highlighting its nature of fluidity. Through his observation on natural and quotidian objects such as trees, stones, leaves, candles, and old photographs, these objects become the carrier of time. Hirakawa spent large amounts of time recording their changes with photography or videos, embedding sheer vitality into digital technology. In his works, Hirakawa filters out colors and sounds, leaving time and space in a void, where he reviews them as images and recites them into verses of time in a slow and comforting rhythm. He invites the viewers to grasp and perceive the world with a brand new perspective by slowing down their pace of life.