Onishi Gallery is proud to present Hideto Imai in a solo show, Daily Life, an exhibition of 30 drawings that reveal the material of Imai’s daily life.
When Hideto Imai shops for food and daily necessities, he collects his shopping receipts. Then, he burns the receipts into charcoal and dissolves the charcoal into water to create ink. He uses the ink to make drawings; this is a way of leaving traces of how he lives on paper. His geometric images can be interpreted as symbolic, cryptographic messages to his viewers. For Imai, the charcoal is an artifact of the receipts, which are in turn a record of the unfolding of daily life, and the drawings are thus an affirmation of life itself.
Imai’s art speaks to mass production, large quantity consumption, and the destruction of nature. The more he collects shopping receipts, the more the waste of daily life overwhelms him. Seeking a good balance of supply and demand, Imai asks himself whether he can manage consumerism.
Imai, born in 1968 in Japan’s Mie Prefecture, has exhibited extensively in Japan and Italy. In 2008, he exhibited in an Onishi Gallery group show, Unity and Isolation. Imai ultimately questions the contents of our shopping baskets, the joy and shame that come from consumption, and the recollection of our daily routines through the residue of charcoal left on paper.