Opening Saturday, July 23, 2011, Wako Works of Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and recent works by Noritoshi Hirakawa. This will be the artist's sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Noritoshi Hirakawa was born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1960, and has been based in New York since 1993. For over 20 years, Hirakawa has been conducting extensive social fieldwork in many parts of the world, and has shown his works in more than 300 exhibitions. His works, varying in medium from photography, video, sound work, text, performance to film, have dealt with wide-ranging and challenging themes from physicality, gender, mass media, religion to contemporary art itself. Varying as they may be, however, at the core lays his agenda of unrelenting questioning and issuing proposals to institutionalized concepts such as the social system and the individual, and the individual and its free will.

Since the earthquake in Northeast Japan earlier this year, there has been a change in the understanding of the relationship between art and society, and a more active debate on what the role of art is today has emerged. The renewed interest in the artist's Hamaoka nuclear power plant series In Reminiscence of the Sea from 2007 can be seen as being part of this change. How should man question the society, and advance forward? What is the Self, the social system, free will and Art?

On view in this exhibition will be new photographs and installation pieces that Hirakawa has selected, with the current situation in Japan in mind, to question the audience and to insist changing the way we take things for granted; also on view will be his work from 1997 that deal with "people's minds", for which he took up ad spaces in Artforum magazine. Through this exhibition, Hirakawa calls out for people to rediscover their fundamental "absolute reality", and to transcend the world established by superficial relationships based on dichotomies, duality, and opposites.

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Noritoshi Hirakawa has shown internationally in museum solo exhibitions including: Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria (2003); Hermès Forum, Tokyo (2002); Magazin4, Vorarlberger Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria (2001); Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan (1996); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (1993); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (1989); and group exhibitions: Japan Society, New York (2007); Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2007); Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria (2006); PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Kunst Werke, Berlin, (2006); and Museum Carouge, Geneva (2005). He currently has a solo show Beyond the sunbeam through the trees at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, running until August 21.