Daijiro Hama is holding a solo exhibition called "THE MOMENT" at MARUEIDO JAPAN for the first time in about two years.
Active between Europe and Japan, he is an artist who depicts things that are born from an inner surface within himself through deep thought while perceiving the surrounding environment and changes in time in his daily life.
PUMAN, a mutant that first appeared in his art exhibited at "MUTANT," a solo exhibition held at MARUIEDO in 2021 and which has become a symbol of his work,
is a self-portrait of Hama, a portrait of the viewer, and he has a "presence" that reflects the purest parts of human beings that everyone has.
PUMAN's friends, Friend, also made their first appearance in his art at the Art Fair Tokyo in 2022 and 2023, events which are still fresh in our memory, as well as at Hama's exhibition "Telepathy" at the Lightseed Gallery (Watari Museum of Contemporary Art) in 2022.
Even though he is a mutant, just like PUMAN, his friends are something other and they are different from himself.
Reflecting the emotions and desires that are born from comparisons between the self and others, Friend takes on various shapes and forms, and Hama also sketches while re-recognizing that his self has been formed from relationships with others.
The decade of the 2020s is said to be an era of change in many different ways - but what kind of changes are happening to Hama himself, and will this be reflected in his art?
In Hama's new work that will be exhibited this time, he is trying a form of expression that mixes sensations and techniques, that he has developed from the knowledge and experiences he has gained to date, with instinctive and impulsive brushstrokes that work against those sensations and techniques.
He adds strokes which distort and erase the iconography and space, and he keeps marks that seem to appear at random from the dripping of paint.
This act which could be called creative destruction and which is born through creation that is between reason and instinct, is a type of update, and it also leads to the creation of infinite rebirth.
However, at the same time it invites risk and chaos.
These intuitive and random brushstrokes appear to hint that instinct and independent thinking are needed in order to surpass existing notions and values, and in order to arrive at a new field of art.
In addition, one characteristic of his work are particle-like things that have been drawn with thin lines. These particles are akin to a kind of quantum mechanics - which scientifically place elementary particles as making up the world - and they represent invisible small existences that form the foundation of all things.
It always exists in the worlds he depicts, and it appears that these particles compose PUMAN and Friends, or they are emitting particles.
Thinking from this perspective, his KŪKAN series and Harmony series feature only these particles, and they catch a close-up visual point of the characters that appear in his art, and a bird's-eye view visual point of the world in which they exist.
Through his expression, which moves back and forth between micro and macro worlds, a world that can also be said to be a parallel world to the real world manifests in his art.
Another characteristic is the presence of little people in his work.
Between 2012 to 2020 he also depicted small people on screens during a period when he was painting black and white artworks.
Even once he began using colors in 2021, he still sometimes created mono-color art, but the first time that the little people appeared with different colors was in his "THE MOMENT" series.
These changes in his little people in his art overlap with variations in people in recent years.
In today's modern-day capitalist society which follows on from the industrial revolution, there are many people who want visible wealth and this has led to standards being established, uniformed, and individualized.
However, Hama sees the 2020s, and thereafter, being a time that attaches importance to invisible things (intelligence and spirituality), and the entering into an era of diversity that emphasizes individuality.
Depictions of individuals, that were previously in the same color, like monochrome, are changing into people with diversity.
"THE MOMENT", which is the title of this exhibition and also the title of his new series of artworks, captures a certain instant, while the thick brush strokes and color gradations dotted across his art makes the viewer become strongly aware of movement and flow.
The large hole depicted in his F200 masterpiece, where energy emerged from a certain point, makes its appearance so far above the ground that is not clear-cut if the little people on the ground are aware of it.
However, without doubt a large presence that exists is the watching of people.
There is another artwork with the same title.
This painting has large humanoid beings, though they appear to have human forms due to a single large blast of energy coming out of the previously mentioned large hole.
The little people are also depicted in a way that raises the question of whether they have gathered together there or were born there.
Here the little people run side-by-side with, are swept along with, are held by, or ride on large humanoid beings.
Even in the world in which we live, we can feel that the energy which exists in nature and the energy that is created by the actions of people have a relationship in which they influence each other, and that this creates great power.
Hama's art has unlimited energies and countless people, and I feel that the relationship between them is like a thread of individual destiny with a diverse range of choices.
However, each one of us, as we go through life, must discover and choose our own paths as we move forward.
We must question where we are, and what is happening.
Today, if we embrace our own present "moments," then I think perhaps we can both look back on our past and look ahead to our future.


Text :    Kentaro Watanabe
Photo:  Ken Kato