Virtual Tour | Hisao Hanafusa: Borrowing Nature‘s Powers.

HISAO HANAFUSA: BORROWING NATURE’S POWERS

CURATED BY DR. TINGTING XU

 

“Power borrowing,” or jieli in early China thought, homographic to chakuriki in Japanese, is a pan-East Asian philosophical concept. It gestures a spontaneous ease and graceful effortlessness one would enjoy through utilizing others’ powers to achieve desired effects. As an artist and a practicing carpenter, Hanafusa uses natural elements—for example light, shadows, humidity, and gravity—to stimulate and explore his material’s spontaneous happening. However, the experiments are conducted in studio circumstances under his delicate control. He tinkers with the boundaries between action, non-action, and reaction, and brings out the inherent beauty of this process through his enacted, enchanting mediums. Uchuiden Kioku (cosmic inherent memory) expresses his feeling for the obscure memories of the primordial cosmos through which he believes everyone is interconnected. The undefined figures in Fifth Dimension further arouse observers’ psychic resonances with paint, as well as an intensified sense of self-consciousness. Hanafusa collaborates with nature through the material, and with it, attains an alchemy that bewilders materiality.