Special Exhibition “Harada Hiroki: Home Port” [Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art]

Harada Hiroki (1989-) debuted in 2012 with plans for the “Lassen Exhibition” and the “Psychic Photo Exhibition,” and began his activities with a project on visual culture that is widely known in society.
Also, in recent years, I have investigated immigrants who crossed to Hawaii from Hiroshima and Yamaguchi, and presented a video work “Shadowing” based on Japanese-American mixed culture.
The characters in this film talk as follows.
Even if you set sail to go a long distance,
It goes back to the same place like a boat with a curved rudder
That place is “myself”
I can never escape “myself”
The work “Home Port,” which has the same name as the title of this exhibition, is based on Lassen's work depicting Lahaina, Maui, which was hit by a large fire in the summer of 2023, a town where many Japanese Americans have moved to.
Harada, who is from Hiroshima and has stayed in Lahaina, chose the title of this work, which means “home port,” as the title of the exhibition. Therefore, it can also be said that this exhibition is a homecoming exhibition for Harada.
In this exhibition, in addition to Harada's newly developed two-dimensional works that are the culmination of the present, we will introduce representative video/installation/performance works created so far, and early paintings from the “Hiroshima period” where he spent most of his teenage years. Please take a look at how his creative process, which shows various developments, returns to his home port like a “boat with a curved rudder.”