Hiraku Suzuki × Yoko Nose Talk Event
November 26 (Thu) , 6:30–8:00 PM

*For details and reservations, please click here.

Locating drawing in the space between images and language, Hiraku Suzuki (b. 1978) explores the expressive possibilities of lines in a contemporary context through an intermedia approach that includes two-dimensional work, sculpture, video, and performance. His methodology, dubbed “alternative archaeology,” is an attempt to reinterpret the world using a series of new signs produced through the process of excavating and documenting line fragments ubiquitous in our daily lives—ranging from research into cave murals to capturing the outlines of dappled sunlight through the leaves of trees—and then reconfiguring these elements through an embodied approach. In this exhibition, entitled Oceans—Organs, Suzuki asserts his current artistic focus with two series of works on canvas that utilize contrasting blue and red backgrounds.

Oceans and Signs (2026), a series featuring signs drawn in a reflective silver ink dancing across a meditative blue background reminiscent of the deep sea or outer space, marks a new development in Suzuki’s practice. The elaborate worldview in this series, which first began in 2025, has evolved in this latest group of works into an expressive vocabulary consisting of simple, controlled points and lines. Onto a base layer of earth and pigment that produces spatial dimension through complex tonal variety, drawings of light, created with spray paint, brushes, fingers, and occasional tree branches, seem to excavate unknown signs. These works brim with the power to evoke myriad narratives across space and time, from bioluminescent plankton in the deep sea, to supernovae in deep space. As a maternal source of life and civilization, and simultaneously a locus for the constant tension of marine pollution and flooding, the ocean serves as a site for Suzuki to explore signs—those from before humanity’s existence, and those that might exist after we are gone—and examine the source of the civilization interwoven throughout our lives.

A series of five other works, part of the Interexcavation series the artist began in 2019, provide a striking juxtaposition through a vivid contrast of red pigments. Backgrounds of red ochre drawn from cave paintings also connect to imagery inside of the human body. Negative stenciled spaces (cavities), bringing to mind blood vessels and organs as they scurrying across the surface of the work, reference the ancient mural technique known as “negative hand” (spraying pigment over one’s hand to leave a stenciled trace) and highlight the pulsation of signs distributed around them. As the invented word “interexcavation” suggests, these works engage with their subject while coaxing the yet-unseen lines from within us and manifesting the fundamental mechanics of drawing.

The artist also references Joan Miró’s symbolic paintings inspired by East Asian calligraphy, and Japanese avant-garde calligrapher Nankoku Hidai’s groundbreaking expressive lines free of textual constraints as significant influences in the development of the two series that make up the core of this exhibition. Suzuki’s practice builds on this lineage and, through the context of contemporary drawing, culminates in an abstract painting imbued with a new semiotic quality.

Internal and external, past and future, human and non-human, macro and micro—the lines of light generated by Hiraku Suzuki freely move among cities, outer space, the deep sea, and internal organs and emerge as a kind of circuitry that links disparate space-times and domains. In much the same way that ancient peoples detected the regularity of the world by carving the waxing and waning of the moon onto animal bones, perhaps so too can Suzuki’s drawing practice be considered “a cosmology of lines” that unravels the mysteries of this world by excavating the universal language latent in all things and constructing it anew. Please take this opportunity to experience the revelations of Suzuki’s artistic practice for yourself at his first solo exhibition at Yutaka Kikutake Gallery.