Hiraki Sawa

Hiraki Sawa, based between London and Kanazawa, creates works that combine moving image with sculptural and two-dimensional elements. While studying sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, he encountered animation software by chance through helping a friend, which led to his first video work dwelling (2002). The piece, featuring model airplanes flying around a small apartment room, was highly acclaimed and brought him to prominence. Subsequent works such as elsewhere (2003) and trail (2005) continued to stage toys, stationery, and the shadows of animals within everyday interiors, producing worlds in which reality and fiction intersect.

Since silts (2009), Sawa has expanded his practice into multi-screen installations incorporating sculptural and two-dimensional components, creating environments where moving images and exhibition space mutually resonate. In absent (2018), hybrid entities such as winged spoons and animated scissors appear, transforming familiar landscapes into the uncanny. Memoria Paralela (2019) extends from his earlier diptych did I? (2011) and Lineament (2012), which reflected on memory and consciousness through the story of a friend who suffered amnesia. Unlike these earlier works, Memoria Paralela unfolds from Sawa’s own perspective, shifting the narrative axis.

In /home (2021), presented in a solo exhibition, Sawa flew small airplanes within the ruins of his demolished childhood home. Unlike the toy planes in dwelling, which launched his career almost two decades earlier, this act reads as a resolute declaration of the artist’s continued engagement with themes of time, place, memory, and consciousness that have remained central throughout his practice. In addition to video, Sawa has been actively producing works on paper, such as drawings and collages. His IOTA series (2016) incorporates photographs from his grandmother’s albums, transformed into stamp-like images and overlaid with white ink patterns, reconstructing an imagined past. Sawa’s worlds—strangely similar yet unlike our own—invite the viewer into an expanded field of imagination.

Biography
1977　Born in Ishikawa, Japan
2003　MFA in Sculpture, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London
Lives and works in London and Kanazawa

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2025　Journeys in Place, Asia Society, New York
2022　flown, Parafin, London
2021　/home, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
2019　MEMORIA PARALELA, Museo Universidad de Navarra, Spain
2018　Latent image revealed, KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre, Kanagawa, Japan
2014　Under the Box, Beyond the Bounds, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo
2003　Hiraki Sawa, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo

Selected Group Exhibitions
2025　Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei
2025　fragment, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
2023　Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
2022　Travelers: Stepping into the Unknown, Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, Tokyo
2020　30th Anniversary Exhibition: Two Madokas—Collection × Five Artists, Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Chiba, Japan
2019　Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2019, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo

Selected Collections
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan
Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan
Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Burgos, Spain
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, USA
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN, USA
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, USA
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, USA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
Norton Family Collection, Santa Monica, CA, USA
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO, USA
Takamatsu City Museum of Art, Kagawa, Japan
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
UBS Art Collection, Zurich, Switzerland
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA