Year: 2013
Medium: acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 73 x 61 cm (28 3⁄4 x 21 in.)
Acquired from SBI Art Auction, 2022
Hirako Yuichi consistently creates work dealing with the relationship between nature and human society, and the value of nature. People living in cities are fond of parks, in which natural flora and fauna are managed by humans. Wildernesses and deep forests, unreachable by people, are so removed from the human world that they are not even subject to comparison in our daily lives. In Even in Hirako’s paintings, nature is depicted in proximity to people’s lives. The human-plant hybrid that Hirako calls “tree man” also seems to symbolize the boundary at which both can coexist by not separating too far from each other. The motif of this work is the titular “Pot,” which in this case refers to a potted plant. Gardening is an act through which people invite nature into their lives without endangering themselves. The selective breeding that takes place in pursuit of this practice—to improve the aesthetics of plants, or how easy they are to grow—could, to a certain extent, be considered a desecration of nature. However, it has come to enrich people’s hearts and lives, or at the very least has not brought about barbarism or violence. This work sees a pot with a cold, dark appearance depicted against a murky background. The form of the plant that would have been potted here is replaced by abstracted yellow-green undulations. The flower that resembles a dangling bunch of grapes might be muscari. The square wooden frame that hangs from the pot, adorning something that appears to be a red skull, resonates with the dark tone of the work as a whole, giving a disturbing impression. It seems as if the artist is using the potted plant, a kind of distortion from the natural state of things, in an effort to express the extreme complexity of humanity’s relationship with nature.
