Koji Hatakeyama: Bronze - Wall and Vessel

Works of Koji Hatakeyama attract attention by original and modern formative art expression using bronze casting.
Simple and decent forms with various rust colors drawn out from bronze give a deep and soft expression on the surface of his works.

Koji Hatakeyama: Beyond Bronze

Koji Hatakeyama has brought out consciousness and expression of the material itself, bronze, and has let it speak out eloquently. Using a casting technique that is able to create complicated formats, he builds up simple and decent forms trimmed superfluous elements. Hatakeyama has been creating deep allusive feeling works whose surfaces have colors and texture given only by bronze.
Nowadays, most of contemporary artists adopt various materials freely in accordance with moment and place. As the inclusive word “mixed media” describes it, they consider material for a full set of media necessitated by their concepts. By contrast, Hatakeyama drew DNA of the material (bronze) through his own body, and he has been working and thinking primarily of his practice to let it dvelop the possibility. His works rarely attracted attention in the so-called “contemporary” art field because of his material-based attitude towards his practice and because of the label as a craft or metalworking artist. Hatakeyama, with his attitude inclining every nerve for digging up and depicting consciousness of bronze for more than 30 years, could be considered self-sacrificing compared with other contemporary artists. However, the output of this unique work style is not monotonous at all. Speculation of meaning / reason, and exploration of look / gesture to create each piece in a certain distance have endowed his works with width and depth just like a pendulum.
At present, Hatakeyama notices that he takes one end as one human being as well as an artist. A core work for this exhibition entitled “Between Blue and Green” is created in this particular situation(period), and the work extends possibilities of his future expression. An approximately two-meter-long, horn-stick-shaped bronze work has both narrow ends with a slight swelling part in the center. With its delicate curve the work is set on the wall at our eye level. Hatakeyama once told me that he had imaged spears, swords and their surrounding space which crystallized a technique, a spirit and a sense of beauty that swordsmiths used to have. The bluish green line is filled with mysterious tense atmosphere as if it cut a wall in a straight edge to make appear another space-time. The line shakes the air right before eyes as one swing of a sword does, and it will also shake audiences’ bodies.

Emiko Yoshioka
Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa