Key Hiraga

Born in Tokyo in 1936, Hiraga’s childhood was spent in wartime, during which his family lived in Morioka, a quiet city surrounded by mountains in north Japan. Influenced by wartime comics, he developed a child’s love for art, and early on drew battle scenes for Japanese soldiers’ care packages. Pressed by his parents to study economics rather than art, he skipped a conventional art education. Ironically, this positioned him, after graduation, to participate in a late-1950s fascination among Japanese artists, especially those unaffiliated with official art societies, with Art Informel and Art Brut, European art movements focused on the gestural line and influenced by art by children and the insane.

Hiraga’s talent was noticed. He was soon winning young-artist prizes, including an award sponsored by the British oil and gas company Shell in 1963, and the grand prize at the 3rd International Young Artists Exhibition in 1964, which included a grant for study in Paris. In 1964, he was invited by William Lieberman, then curator of Drawing and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to participate in the museum’s exhibition New Japanese Painting and Sculpture, where he would show two oil paintings, The Day It Rained (1963), and The Window (1964). 

In Key Hiraga’s work of the late-60s and early-70s you will find yourself in a comical world of swollen extremities and orifices: boobs, dicks, noses, and tongues, licking, waggling, penetrating, and pimpled. This is a floating world where sex, lurid and illogical, is everywhere, and biology operates according to chaotic rules. Bodies might interpenetrate, split apart, or open a window into their innards.  Key Hiraga is loosely associated with the Buraiha (Decadent School) collective of Japanese writers, who saw dissolution and pleasure as ways out of the asceticism and dreariness of the postwar period.  From 1964 to 1974 Hiraga lived in an idealist, radicalized Paris.

In the mid-1970s, Hiraga’s paintings, which until then had happened in a flat non-space, began to impose a reality principle, the third dimension. His figures were suddenly somewhere: in cars or rooms, posing on beaches, stalking through a red-light district. After a decade-and-more of travels, he returned, in 1977, permanently to Japan. The bodily chaos of the previous years coalesced into figures and figure-groups drawing on historical genres, like ukiyo-e, and artists, like Hiroshige.  Gangsters glare, with stylized, self-consciously Japanese accoutrements: folding screens and tatami mats, cherry blossoms, and fugu.

Key Hiraga died in 2000 in Hakone-Yumoto at the age of 64. His work is included the public collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art (MOMAT), Tokyo, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (MoMAK), Kyoto, Japan; National Museum of Art Osaka (NMAO), Osaka, Japan.