Day Dream

Young talent from Central Saint Martins, Hiroaki Onuma takes over the Sobering gallery from December 5th. The Daydream exhibition takes us on a journey into a pop universe with Japanese influences.

Hiroaki Onuma was born in 1988 in the Japanese prefecture of Tochigi, an industrial basin with an exceptional natural heritage. At the age of 18, he left his province for the capital. In Tokyo, fashion marketing studies took him on a creative path. Hiroaki’s adventurous character sets him apart from those around him. Eager to leave Japan to explore the world, he applies to the prestigious Central Saint Martins school in London. He was accepted in 2009 and left to follow a course that took him from fashion to the fine arts.

Since then, Hiroaki Onuma has exulted all his pop energy in monumental compositions featuring his iconic creatures. Hiroaki Onuma’s aesthetic boldness is expressed through acidic tones and hip-hop iconography, unscrupulously shocking artistic good taste.

This radical painting has its origins in the movements of Western Pop Art and Japanese underground manga. To describe his work, the artist defines himself as an heir to Funk Art, a figurative and humorous pictorial movement assuming the second degree and the trash aesthetic, represented by Peter Saul, the spiritual father of Hiroaki Onuma.

明 The monsters featured on Onuma’s paintings are mutants that have escaped Japanese folklore. The multi-headed dragons reinterpret the mythical Yamata-no-Orochi. An Amabie, a prophetic creature announcing abundance or plagues, appears on a canvas created during the pandemic. Fish, protectors in the Japanese tradition, are also projected in this comic book universe.

Hiroaki Onuma coagulates all these influences to form a fusion-painting, analogous to fusion-food: a crossbreeding with intentionally maintream accents.

Text: Samuel Landée