Yuichi Hirako: Bright Forest: Solo Exhibition

YIRI ARTS Jakarta is pleased to present BRIGHT FOREST, the first solo exhibition in Indonesia by Japanese artist Yuichi Hirako, on view from 3 October to 8 November 2026. Bringing together painting, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition continues Hirako's longstanding exploration of coexistence and interdependence among humans, plants, animals, and the natural environment, while reconsidering the ways in which nature is perceived, constructed, and assigned meaning through human experience.

Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1982, Hirako received his BFA from Wimbledon College of Art, London, in 2006 and currently lives and works in Tokyo. Having grown up surrounded by forests and hills, he became increasingly aware during his time in London of how urban parks, indoor plants, and cultivated green spaces are transplanted, maintained, and shaped according to human needs. This experience became a key point of departure for his practice, establishing an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between the natural and the artificial, and between human and non-human forms of life.

Hirako's works are frequently inhabited by hybrid human-plant figures, animals, dense forests, and everyday objects such as books, musical instruments, boats, and potted plants. These recurring elements form an expanding narrative world in which distinctions between human and non-human, nature and culture, reality and imagination remain fluid. Nature is not positioned as a passive backdrop, but as an active presence with its own temporalities, systems of life, and modes of existence.

Characterized by vivid color, intricate compositions, and layered symbolic imagery, Hirako's paintings often evoke the spatial logic of theatre or cinema, while his sculptures and installations extend these imagined ecosystems into physical space. Moving between classical pictorial traditions and contemporary visual culture, he has developed a distinctive visual language through which questions of how humans organize, control, and assign value to nature are continually reconsidered.

Through BRIGHT FOREST, Hirako brings his continuously evolving visual world into a new geographical and cultural context. Encounters between different forms of life, materials, and human-made environments position coexistence not as a static or idealized state of harmony, but as an ongoing condition shaped through dependency, negotiation, and the continual reorientation of relationships. In doing so, the exhibition extends Hirako’s inquiry into the shifting boundaries between humanity, nature, and the environments we inhabit.