BIO
Nature and geography have something in common: their boundaries are put in place by humans and are all but made up. Takashi Harada dissolves these natural and geographical boundaries in his artwork. For Takashi, all natural things have a common and equal value. When in nature, he believes, you connect back to it one atom at a time. Born in Japan, Takashi’s international existence made him face his Japanese identity as well his identity within the natural world. His art reflects that feeling, blurring natural light and color in ethereal paintings that merge harsh divisions and avoid representation in favor of capturing feeling.
Takashi Harada is a Japanese Painting (Nihonga) artist and lives and works in Manhattan, NY. He was born in a small porcelain-making town, Arita, Saga, in Japan.After completing the PhD program of the Graduate School of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and in 1998, he moved out from Japan. Since then he had stayed in Germany, France, and Canada, before arriving in U.S in 2001. He was granted a fellowship “Japanese Government Overseas Study Programme for Artists” from the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkacho) of Japanese Government in 2005. Staying outside of Japan made him to face the identity of himself being Japanese, at the same time it gave him opportunities to contemplate about the connection between human beings and other natural matters while collecting the images of nature in other countries.Harada believes that all natural things, including human beings, have a sort of common structure, and that each of them exist having the equal value of a molecule or an atom. He also believes that when humans place their bodies in nature, the information recorded in those bodies since conception dissolves into the natural world, that their common genetic structure reconnects them to the rest of nature, one small atom at a time. He wishes to create artworks that can evoke such a feeling.He has been exhibiting his artworks in numerous exhibitions over 30 years in Japan and US. Most recently he had a solo exhibition at Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in Inwood, Manhattan in New York City in 2018.
