Hideyuki Sobue: The Way I See

We celebrated the opening of Hideyuki Sobue’s exhibition The Way I See at the Daiwa Foundation Japan House Gallery on 24 October 2013.  The artist was introduced by Jimmy S. S. Lek, the founder of ArtGemini Prize, London.

Hideyuki Sobue is a Japanese artist living and working in the Lake District where this project is based. This exhibition, supported by Arts Council England, embodies a series of portraits of people he has come to know personally, with each work designed to be exhibited in diptychs: one half featuring the portrait, the other a carpet of fallen leaves observed in the area. The leaves also symbolize the vast majority of people, often neglected, who have never been – and will never be – the subject of a portrait and thus the works become a metaphoric juxtaposition.

The project is completed in the unique brush hatching technique he has created and developed over the past decade, using Japanese sumi ink and acrylic inspired by the classic method of disegno, established in the Florentine School during the Renaissance, in combination with neurological studies, which show that the human visual brain perceives objects predominantly by oriented lines. With this technique, he attempts to embody how humans see when exploring the uniqueness of humanity with their creativity, by combining artistic and cultural heritage from both East and West, ideological legacy and contemporary understanding.

 

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