The culmination of 10 years of creative work

"Wonder Tribe Namibia" depicts "indigenous fantasy characters" based on the Himba and Herero peoples of Namibia, and "Lion Dance" is based on the Japanese lion dance. And works depicting insects, which have been symbols of good luck and good fortune since ancient times. These images are formed from luxury fashion house monograms, articles cut out from fashion magazines, and dot patterns hand-drawn with markers. Nagao Hiroshi is a collage artist who brings out the customs, rituals, and natural objects of unknown worlds using "whatever" materials. His works are handled by Western galleries such as Mirus Gallery in Los Angeles, USA, and Lechbinska Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland, and his fans include DJ Black Coffee, music producer, and rapper Swizz Beatz.

This exhibition, "Wild Thought," is a culmination of Nagao's creative work spanning more than 10 years, and features approximately 25 pieces, ranging from his earliest works from around 2012, when he was based in Germany, to his latest works. The works will be on display alongside photographs he took during fieldwork in various countries around the world that he has undertaken in conjunction with the creation of his works.

Nagao Hiroshi was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture in 1981. He was fond of art and crafts from an early age, studied design at the Visual Communication Department of Nagoya Zokei University, and worked as a graphic designer after graduating. He also produced artworks at the same time, and in 2005 he distinguished himself by being selected for the Uniqlo Creative Award 2005*. He gained more recognition at art fairs overseas than in Japan, and after a successful solo exhibition in Hong Kong in 2009, he moved to Berlin, Germany in 2012 and began working full-time as an artist.

*Uniqlo Creative Award: currently called UTGP

Expressing primitive aesthetics and thoughts

In Europe, art is deeply rooted in everyday life, and while he feels fulfilled as an artist, he is also confronted with the fact that he is an "other" in a society where "diverse races are roaming about." This leads him to constantly question his identity: why he aspires to become an artist, why he uses collage as a technique, and who he is.

Who am I? And why do European and American values ​​still hold absolute standards? He says that he became "tremendously" interested in identity. In order to experience places outside the West, places where pre-modern cultures remain, he visited Mexico in 2016, and then traveled to Namibia, Mongolia, and India, where he conducted fieldwork living with indigenous tribes.

"Through my travels and fieldwork, I discovered unique aesthetic sensibilities, values, and cultures. At the same time, I witnessed how the spiritual foundations of the local people were being lost due to internationalization and resource exploitation, and I felt a sense of crisis that their diverse and unique cultures might end up existing only behind glass cases in museums. Aren't we ourselves the tribes that seem to be in danger of disappearing?"

The theme Nagao found was "We are the indigenous people of the future." What will we leave to our future generations as people living in the present? He asks. The theme of "others" has emerged in the world of contemporary art since the 1990s. A trend of multiculturalism has emerged that questions values ​​centered on America and Europe and accesses non-Western and minorities, and many artists have emerged who incorporate fieldwork in non-Western regions based on cultural anthropology and folklore into their artwork. In the 2020s, when keywords such as "others" and multiculturalism are becoming more prominent once again, Nagao can be said to be part of that lineage.

A timeless symbol

The exhibition, "Wild Thought," is named after the book of the same name by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss reported that non-Western indigenous peoples, who were considered crude "savages" by modern Western scientific thinking, have their own systematization of natural phenomena, plants and animals. He distinguished their way of thinking from modern science, calling it the "science of the concrete," and explained it by likening it to "bricolage." Bricolage is the process of making something with tools and materials that are "available" at the time and place, rather than something that is planned in advance. Nagao has determined the identity of his own creative method, collage, and creates works using a variety of materials, including old magazines, thread, cloth, driftwood, and sometimes basketball goal nets, while also taking into account modern procedures such as copy machines from 24-hour convenience stores and online shopping. All of the available tools and materials have their own uses, and exist as "symbols" such as products and logos. In bricolage, symbols are repurposed, transformed, and rearranged in new ways, mocking conventional wisdom and sometimes revealing their presence with destructive impact. A punk's safety pin, a black cat aiming for a society based on mutual aid, an umbrella to protect democracy... We will continue to express our opinions with symbols in the future.

Nagao also rearranges symbols, expressing people who live indigenous lifestyles and monsters such as Tengu and Oni as symbols of "the primordial intuition, aesthetic sense, and thoughts that are engraved within us." He says that this can be a great hint for surviving in this turbulent era. The instincts and ethnicity that lie dormant within us, which must not be surrendered to technology or modern systems, emerge from Nagao's bricolage.