INTERVIEW | HIROKI YAGI

ARTIST INTERVIEW | HIROKI YAGI

A sink piled with dishes. Empty cans and instant-noodle cups left where they fell. HIROKI YAGI paints the slightly-too-lived-in corners that every home has.

Moving between digital painting and oils, the Tokyo-based artist captures moments where opposites share a single frame: gloom and pop, straight lines and curves, crisp edges and soft blur. We asked him where it all began.

01 Something of his own

Yagi always liked to draw, but he only began painting seriously after university.

At university he studied information science and media art, and after graduating he became a web engineer. Wanting to make work of his own outside his job, he started painting.

02 Hiroshi Nagai and the Surrealists

Manga, anime, games, music: his influences are too wide to narrow down to one. In painting, though, two names stand out — the illustrator Hiroshi Nagai, and the Surrealists. "In the beginning, I was strongly influenced by them."

The quiet, faintly uncanny air of Yagi's interiors may well start here.

03 From ballpoint pen to iPad

He began with portraits drawn in ballpoint pen, purely as a hobby. Buying an iPad changed things: "Little by little I started painting properly, in full colour, digitally."

Today he works mainly on the iPad, and has recently brought oil paint into the process, making pieces that combine both.

04 The kitchen he couldn't clean

Rooms and domestic scenes recur throughout his work, and it started with his own kitchen. Living alone and busy, he let the dishes pile up.

"Looking at that neglected kitchen, it was a gloomy scene, in a way. But the way things were scattered around so freely also felt really lively — even pop."

He painted that feeling, and the result was No Staff, which hangs in the current exhibition. "That was the piece that led to my style today."

05 Flowers in bloom, flowers wilting

His recurring motifs are kitchens and flowers. The show includes three new kitchen paintings, the Dancing on the kitchen series. The flowers follow the same idea:

"I paint around the theme of something feeling both positive and negative at once. So a flower has parts in bloom, and parts already wilting."

06 Opposites, in one rhythm

What draws Yagi is the particular feeling that appears when contradictory things mix — and lately, the way they mix. "I'm experimenting with the rhythm: how to bring different things together so they can coexist in one picture."

Where he once paired pop colour with shadowy, darker moods, he now plays line against line: straight against curved, sharp against blurred. "So the new works are a little more abstract than before. I don't make every line crisp — I let some of them blur."

From the dense detail of No Staff to the overlapping planes of Dancing on the kitchen, the messy kitchen has started to dance.