Industrial Culture

Hiro Yamagata creates artworks that are simultaneously high tech and elemental, theoretical and visceral, abstract and immersive. He explores the links between science and art, micro and macro phenomenon, and geography, ecology, technology and cultural memory. His most recent endeavor, planned for completion in 2009, will create 160 – 240 images of Buddhas on the site of the once enormous Bamiyan Buddhas, which were destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Over 140 laser systems installed 500m, 1km and 5km in distance from the Bamiyan hills will project multiple layers of original drawings in striking colors. The laser images will be projected for 2 hours after sunset, once or twice a week. The laser systems built specifically for this installation will shoot long range green beams and short range multiple color beams, designed to create a striking contrast to the purplish red hue of the Bamiyan sunset and the black mountain shadows. The energy used by the laser systems will be produced by environmentally friendly windmills and solar power plants. The power produced is also meant to provide light and electricity for the people of Bamiyan.

Yamagata’s other projects include his 2001 installation at the at the Guggenheim Museum in Balboa Spain, a changing exhibition comprised of laser technologies and refractive surfaces, and his 1998 public exhibition in Los Angeles when he "flooded" over one mile of the Los Angeles River with monumentally scaled laser lights. For his earlier Yokohama project, co-hosted by NASA, a pair of 20-metre cubes covered with holographic panels refracting beams of sunlight showered colored rays over surrounding buildings to create a mesmerizing, dematerializing effect. Hiro Yamagata was born in Japan in 1948, and studied at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he befriended members of the Beat Generation including Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. He moved to Los Angeles in 1978 where he continues to live and work. Yamagata’s ongoing exploration of immersive environments is perhaps best represented by the artist’s studio, or "laboratory," which is a permanent, yet constantly changing installation.

"QUANTUM FIELD X3" AND FURTHER REVELATIONS By SAM HUNTER

In his profound desire and pursuit to perceive the infinite, Hiro Yamagata has probed the minutest microcosms and, in a seeming paradox, expanded his consciousness into cosmic realms. But in "Quantum Induction," his latest, most ambitious laser installation, the Japanese-born artist who bases his wide-ranging activities in Los Angeles comes closer than ever before to realizing his elusive, ultimate goal. "I do not want to miss the simple things of life: the rose petals, flowering nature," Yamagata has said. "I think of nature in a pretty simple way; it is something close to me. I also want to live a simple life as an artist. I am not really concerned about being a great artist, or a great thinker, or a great philosopher. "I want to live a simple life, and make sure that I experience everything around me, to the fullest capability of all my senses."

Given the scope of his quite extraordinary range of projects that include the lushly painted luxury cars in Earthly Paradise of the mid-nineties and the confrontational monumentality of such late-nineties statements as Eternity or What and American Lips, the emphasis on simplicity in his credo might seem disingenuous. But, in a typically paradoxical and engaging Zen style, Yamagata has expressed nothing more -- and nothing less - than the force motivating all of his quests, from a youthful interest in the starry night sky and then quantum physics to his recent mastery of the complex technology necessary to throw open the very doors of perception, and give shape to the mysterious forces that drive life itself.

In his most recent adventure, Quantum Induction, the dramatic, luminous production planned for a June 2004 premiere this summer at Frank Gehry's spectacular, sinuous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Yamagata builds on his fascination with environmental light shows that actually began during the seventies, when he found himself living in Paris, at the forefront and cutting-edge of the Paris art scene, and tentatively exploring the use of lighting equipment. However, it took two more decades before he seriously became engaged by ambitious and complex laser installations, commencing in 1997 with his complex, ground-breaking Element installation, produced at the Fred Hoffman Fine Art gallery in Santa Monica. Five years later Yamagata's ambitious laser-light display at the Bilbao Guggenheim in 2001 Photon 0.99 cast brilliant prismatic beams around its enchanted visitors.

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Some works of Hiro Yamagata:












Transient, 2007
This series explores the transient world beneath the surface of consciousness. We experience life on many levels and our conscious mind is only the beginning. The human brain does not function like a computer, simply taking in information and processing data. While the conscious mind is engaged - in conversation, watching a film, listening to a piece of music, holding hands with a lover or soothing a crying child - the subconscious mind is simultaneously activated. Our experience in the moment stirs up thoughts, emotions and images and these materialize, seemingly out of thin air. They rise up from within buried memories, forgotten dreams, and fleeting ideas, and are coaxed to the surface by conscious experience. Physical touch or the inflection in a stranger's voice suddenly stir the imagination and bring forth long forgotten memories. These shadow images often flash across the mind too quickly for us to capture and we are left with a fleeting impression, a vibration of emotion that we cannot quite grasp. So each interaction is much more complex than it appears on the surface. There is the conscious, physical experience and the feelings and thoughts that are provoked by that experience. Even as we live in the moment, we simultaneously experience a second, third, fourth or fifth reality. This place, between our many levels of consciousness, this shadowy world in the human mind, is the subject of this series. TRANSIENT attempts to unlock the mind's internal door and allow the viewer to walk through the shadows - to discover what lies beneath the surface of their own mind.







Sources:
Hiro Yamagata HP
Symposium C6