Yuki Harada

Solo Exhibition

Dreams and Shadows

2025.2.1 (Sat.) - 3.1 (Sat.)

Gallery hours: 12:00 – 18:00
closed on Sundays, Mondays, and holidays
Opening reception: February 1 (Sat.), 17:00 – 19:00
*The artist will be present at the reception.
Talk event：
①February 15 (Sat.), 18:00 – 19:30　Participants: Yuki Harada, Ryuta Ushiro (Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group)
②March 1 (Sat.), 18:00 – 19:30　Participants: Yuki Harada, Mihoko Nishikawa (Curator)

We at ANOMALY are pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition of works by Yuki Harada. The exhibition, Harada’s first at ANOMALY, is titled Dreams and Shadows, and will run from February 1 (Sat.) to March 1 (Sat.), 2025.

Born in 1989, Yuki Harada takes insignificant elements of visual culture as his motifs, and uses technologies and performances to produce and show works that get at the essence of society and individuals.
In 2023, Harada was selected as one of the finalists from among more than 1,000 entrants in Terrada Art Award 2023, and received the Jury Prize (Yukie Kamiya Award). In 2024, his Shadowing works was acquired by the Museum of Japanese Emigration to Hawaii as the first work of contemporary art in its permanent collection. In short, he is one of the most closely watched young artists in Japan today.
At present, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art is holding an exhibition titled Yuki Harada: Home Port, which is also his first large-scale solo exhibition in a museum. The ANOMALY exhibition will overlap somewhat with that one.

Harada made his debut as an artist in 2012 with the exhibitions Lassen and Shinrei-shashin [Ghost Photo] while he was still an undergraduate at Musashino Art University. In the following year, at age 23, he authored the book Essays on Works and Reception of Lassen in Japan, which was published by Film Art, Inc., and launched into activities from these and other projects that were intended to pull people in and stimulate discussion.

Beginning in 2019, Harada sporadically stayed in Hawaii, and took note of transnational cultural motifs exemplified by pidgin English, which developed independently there. In 2022, he came out with Shadowing, a work that took the hybrid culture of Japanese Americans as its subject. This was followed in 2023 by a solo exhibition at the Museum of Japanese Emigration to Hawaii. This was that museum’s first exhibition of contemporary art.

Meanwhile, Harada began producing digital landscapes in 2021. In a solo exhibition held at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, he created a stir with his showing of Waiting for, a CG animation work with a running time of over 33 hours.
In this work, Harada did a performance in which he made a non-stop recitation of names of animals living on the earth, for the entire 33 hours. In advance of Waiting for, he produced One Million Seeings, in which viewers can continue to look at discarded photographs for 24 hours. He therefore brought out lengthy video works, one after the other.

Home Port, which is being shown in this exhibition, is part of Harada’s Dreamscape series positioned as a sequel to Waiting for.
Since 2019, Harada has been doing research based in Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Lahaina was once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It is also the hometown of Christian Lassen, whom Harada has been researching, and had many Japanese American residents. However, the town was destroyed in August 2023 by a wildfire whose underlying cause was climate change. This disastrous fire claimed the lives of more than 100 people.

Home Port was shown about three months after the disaster. It is a digital landscape depicting both the distant past and future of Lahaina as envisioned by Harada.
The progress of humankind has been dealt heavy blows when viewed in units of centuries, but Lahaina has and presumably will continue to retain its shape when viewed in units of millions of years. Grounded in Harada’s powers of imagination, Home Port is the sublimation of a global catastrophe into a work of art.
In the exhibition, two versions of this work, one digital and one physical, are displayed.

Harada’s activities of artistic expression cover a wide range including photography, computer graphics, performance, and curation. At their core, however, has always been the aspect of encouraging the participation of viewer.
Besides his earliest activities aimed at inducing discussion, this aspect may be exemplified by works such as One Million Seeings, which shows photos for 24 hours, and Waiting for, in which Harada continues to recite the names of animals for 33 hours. In each of these works abides an awareness of the question of how viewers participate, or can be empowered to participate, in works.

The related attribute could perhaps be termed “theatricality.” As if to corroborate this characterization, the title of Harada’s work Waiting for is taken from Waiting for Godot, the famed play by Samuel Beckett.

Light Court, Harada’s latest work, symbolizes this theatricality. This is the first time it is being shown at an exhibition other than the aforementioned one in Hiroshima.

A single chair is placed in an empty room by the ocean. No one is sitting on it, and we cannot tell if its occupant is about to appear or has already gone. It has already been pointed out that the scene in this picture resembles the worldview of Endgame, which ranks alongside Waiting for Godot as one of Beckett’s masterpieces.*1

When gazing at Light Court, the viewer’s line of sight is naturally led to the chair in the middle. At this time, the dreamscape unfolds before the eye of the imagination. This mechanism indicates that Harada encourages viewer participation in his two-dimensional works as well.

Light Court references Edward Hopper in the way it also leaves the impression of elongated shadows marking a certain rhythm. Long shadows falling across a dream-like world. This may be hinting at the existence of the two series making up this exhibition: Dreamscape (= dreams) and Shadowing (= shadows).

As the above suggests, this exhibition will be an unprecedented opportunity to get an overview of the art of Yuki Harada by seeing multiple series of his work. We hope you don’t miss this first solo exhibition of works by Harada at ANOMALY, and are looking forward to your visit.

At ANOMALY, Harada will be participating in a talk event with Ryuta Ushiro, a member of the artist collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, who is a friend of his, on February 22 (Sat.), and in another with Mihoko Nishikawa, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, on March 1 (Sat.), the last day of the exhibition. For details, see the websites and social media accounts of ArtSticker and ANOMALY.

We would also like to note that Yuki Harada: Home Port, the first collection of Harada’s work published in January 2025 by Film Art, will be on sale at the gallery. This book contains the works shown in this exhibition, scenes of the exhibition venue at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the text of interviews, and studies written by Harada.
In addition, there will be advance sales of a monograph concerning the solo exhibition at the Museum of Japanese Emigration to Hawaii and Shadowing, titled Shadowing: A Journey of Chasing Shadows (this and that) at the venue. Besides numerous essays, this book is slated to contain the script for Shadowing and other pieces.

Please take a look at these two books, which include many of the works displayed at this exhibition, during your visit.

Notes
1. Miho Odaka, “Dreaming of a Landscape to Come” Yuki Harada: Home Port (compiled under the supervision of Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art), Film Art, Inc., 2025.

Yuki Harada
1989: Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture
2013: Awarded a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Arts Policy and Management, Musashino Art University
2016: Awarded a master of fine arts degree in inter-media art from the Tokyo University of the Arts

Artist. Yuki Harada takes insignificant elements of visual culture as his motifs, and uses technologies and performances to express the essence of society and individuals in the form of landscapes and self-portraits.
Harada made his debut as an artist with the exhibitions Lassen and Shinrei-shashin [Ghost Photo] in 2012, and as an author with the publication of his Essays on Works and Reception of Lassen in Japan in 2013. He launched his activities from these and other projects that were aimed at stimulating discussion. Beginning in 2019, Harada sporadically stayed in Hawaii, and took note of transnational cultural motifs exemplified by pidgin English, which developed independently there. In 2021, he began producing CG works, including Waiting for, a CG animation work with a running time of over 33 hours, and Shadowing, whose subject is the hybrid culture of Japanese Americans.
He took up residence in New Jersey as a fellow under the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists in 2017, and in Hawaii in 2021. In 2023, Harada was selected as one of the finalists in Terrada Art Award 2023, and received the Yukie Kamiya Award. In 2024, his Shadowing works were acquired by the Museum of Japanese Emigration to Hawaii as the first works of contemporary art in its permanent collection.

Outline of the exhibition
Artist: Yuki Harada
Title：Dreams and Shadows
Run: February 1 (Sat.) – March 1 (Sat.), 2025
Gallery hours: 12:00 – 18:00 closed on Sundays, Mondays, and holidays
0pening reception: February1 (Sat.), 17:00 – 19:00*The artist will be present at the reception.
Talk event: February 15 (Sat.), 18:00 – 19:30
Participants: Yuki Harada, Ryuta Ushiro (Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group)
Talk event: March 1 (Sat.), 18:00 – 19:30
Participants: Yuki Harada, Mihoko Nishikawa (Curator)

Held by: ANOMALY
Cooperation: Hiroshima City Museum Contemporary Art, KEN NAKAHASHI
Support: FY2024 Agency for Cultural Affairs Project to Support Emerging Media Arts Creators
Cooperation with equipment: Delta Electronics (Japan), Inc.