Art by Hiroyuki Nakamura
A digital exhibit of paintings by Hiroyuki Nakamura
Select a painting to view it up close, for its title and description. Scroll to read the artist's statement below.
Artist’s Statement
My work takes place in the imaginary proscenium of the Great American West, a place where past lore is double exposed with today’s reality-TV world. These two timelines appear to be corresponding and synced, but, like the east and west banks of the Mississippi River, they never actually meet. The characters in my paintings often borrow the cowboy persona, and the stories are narrated by them. I see my paintings as documentations of a modern day expedition, combined with collected artifacts created by native people of “America Land”. I still don’t have a definite conclusion, but I assume that I am looking for a metaphorical equivalent of the flowing water of Mississippi River.
— Hiroyuki Nakamura
About Hiroyuki Nakamura
Hiroyuki Nakamura was born in 1977 and grew up in a suburb of the small industrial city of Hamamatsu, Japan. As a kid, he was fascinated with railroads, and at the age of five he started taking pictures of trains. In 1989, when he was 11 years old, his family relocated to Chicago, for his father’s work. During that time, he attended a boarding high school, and with his family he drove all over the U.S., including Alaska (of course, Canada as well!), which allowed him to discover the vast American West while also photographing railroads along the way.
Hiro attended Drexel University, where he studied photography and history. By the time he had finished the program, however, his interest had shifted from conventional photography to fine art photography, having been influenced by artists like Francesca Woodman, Eikoh Hosoe, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. In 2000, Hiro moved to New York to study art and contemporary photography at the School of Visual Arts. Since 2004, he has been making paintings while living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Also He has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, The Millay Colony for the Arts, Newark Museum, SÍM in Iceland and Bronx Museum’s AIM program.