Onishi Gallery is proud to present Hideto Imai in a solo show, Stock Box. This exhibition’s theme, “Stock Box,” was born from the experience of the recent earthquake in Japan. Since the earthquake, Imai has increasingly felt the importance of “daily life.” He recognizes the significance of obtaining “things” and “food” in everyday life. Today we are surrounded by all our necessities and subsequently lose a sense of striving to obtain them.
“Stock Box” exists inside the artist’s mind. When Hideto Imai shops for food and daily necessities, he collects his shopping receipts. He burns them 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 work expresses his view of the world economy in terms of its cyclical structure and circulation. This exhibition is his attempt to organize this structure as imagery in his mind. Original materials are combined, consolidated, and reformed as a new product.
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, followed by a solo exhibition in 2009 of Daily Life. Imai’s examination of the structure of consumption and daily life is complicated further by his realization of the impermanence of things following the tragic 2011 Japan earthquake. 19 of the 30 pieces in this exhibition were created directly following the earthquake.