Naotakahiro pushes his body to its limits with abstract paintings

Seven years ago, Naotakahiro received a heart-wrenching text message from his wife while at the Los Angeles airport. “There was someone under the house,” she wrote. “Someone has a cough.” He suddenly canceled his flight to Japan and rushed home to see his panicked wife. Hiro ventures into the small space beneath his home and finds no one there. Maybe it was a raccoon, he thought. But then he noticed a blanket.

“There were people out there,” he told me recently, with no sign that the memory caused any anxiety.

Instead of running away in fear like most people would, Hiro stayed, intrigued by the idea that this claustrophobic small space had once been someone’s temporary home. “I was like, wow, this is so uncomfortable,” Hiro said. “But, after 30 minutes, I thought, this must be okay. It was damp, quiet, cold. I heard sounds on the other side: my dog ​​running around, my wife and son.” He likened the experience to being in the underworld.

This has all informed some of his recent paintings, which he created by hanging the canvas just 13 inches from his body, the exact same height as the cramped space of his Los Angeles home. Working alone in his studio without the help of any assistant, Hiroshi lay on his back and began painting stunning abstract works. Filled with forms resembling greenery, silvery fish gills and necrotic veins, these paintings are part of Hiro’s ongoing exploration of his own psyche. “My body is always in contact with surfaces,” he says.

Hiro’s latest creation—which will be on view at New York’s Bortolami Gallery through November 1—is not an abstract painting in the traditional sense. As with many of his recent works, the canvases are not stretched or mounted on easels during the production process. Instead, he often cuts holes in the canvas and inserts his body through the holes, essentially placing himself inside the painting as he creates it. Most of the works in this exhibition feature ropes; Hiro uses them to wrap the canvas around himself, allowing him to paint not only the area in front of himself, but also the space behind, to the sides and around him.

he pointed Untitled (solvent)a painting produced in 2025 using this method. Its edges are wrapped with purple ropes that extend from the canvas to the floor below, where they gather in loops. “It’s kind of like a 360-degree body scanner,” he said with a smile.

Hiro’s artistic style is unconventional, which may explain why he has gained a cult following in Los Angeles, where he has lived since 1991. The artist worked as a studio assistant to Paul McCarthy and has appeared in exhibitions organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian, as well as the Hammer Museum’s acclaimed biennial Made in LA.

Gradually, his work became increasingly valued outside of Los Angeles. In 2024, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hung a recently acquired work by Hiro in its gallery, alongside a painting by Joan Mitchell. Hiro’s work can currently be found in “Roppongi Crossing,” a periodic survey of Japanese contemporary art conducted by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Tokyo gallery Misako & Rosen, which has exhibited Hiro’s work since 2007, brought his work to Art Basel in Paris this week.

Among Hiro’s fans is Koki Tanaka, a critically acclaimed Japanese artist who performed with Hiro early in his career. Tanaka said he was impressed by Hiroshi’s use of his art as a means of self-exploration. “He used his body understand His body,” Tanaka said.

Hiro got his start in film, not art. Born in Osaka in 1972, he came to the United States when he was 18 and spoke little English. He came to California with the intention of becoming a filmmaker, but, he recalls, “I didn’t have the guts to ask people to work with me.” Feeling that he was too modest to hire a cast and crew, Hiro decided to go it alone.

He said that he cherishes the feeling in his early personal work, “You don’t know what is what anymore. Maybe I am a performer or a director.” In addition, he is interested in the twin concepts of “control and being controlled, watching and being watched.”

Like most filmmakers, Hiro was already working on storyboards for his films. But soon these preparatory drawings became props in his films. It was then that he realized he might have always been an artist. “You know, I never really wanted to be a painter,” he said. (Although Hiro holds a BFA from UCLA; he later received an MFA from CalArts.)

The artist owes his first mature works to McCarthy, the sculptor who served as Hiro’s undergraduate professor and later his employer. Like McCarthy, Herro seems fascinated by bodily functions that some might find disgusting. One video even shows a close-up of him peeing, with his penis overlapping twice as a metaphor for the hands of a clock. Other works allude to vomiting and defecation, behaviors that also appear in McCarthy’s abject art.

In one of the earliest introductions to Hiro in 2007, curator Catherine Taft claimed that the works were influenced by Gutai, the postwar Japanese avant-garde movement. This comparison has persisted ever since, recurring in Hiro’s art criticism. In a sense, this makes sense: Kazuo Shiraga, a leading Gutai artist, created a legendary performance in 1955 called ” challenging mudhe smeared its titular substance with his hands. Such works have a distinct material quality, as do those of Hiro; like Hiro, Shiraga hails from Osaka. But Hiroshi told me that McCarthy introduced him to Gutai, which he had never heard of while living in Japan.

Still, like the Gutai artists, Hiro viewed his paintings as something akin to performances. As for the connection between his art and Gutai, he had to admit: “Maybe there is a connection.”

For some of his recent works, Hiro paints according to strict rules laid down in advance. To complete the moves, he says, “I set a timer for an hour or two hours. During that time, I do the move. Then I stop, go back to the same position, and do it again. I call it a session.”

Then he puts it another way: “I make a rule. I work within the rules. Then I break it.” He compares his working methods to those of Bruce Nauman, an artist whose work sometimes begins with simple gestures—pacing up and down an empty corridor, as in a 1968 piece he created called ” Walking with Contrapposto— they become increasingly unstable as they are implemented over and over again.

Hiro is rarely so candid about his work, and he sometimes paints according to codes that are not readily revealed to the viewer. (One such code used in Bortolami’s work involves associating Hiro’s movements with different colors—red, yellow, and blue all rolled into one, like “old video cables,” he says.) I told Hiro that his art seemed closed off, as if he didn’t want people to know how he was using his body in his art. Has he ever thought about filming himself in the process of creating his paintings? “I didn’t want to show the whole process this way because it’s all here,” he says, alluding to the works surrounding him when we spoke in Bortolami.

However, in a recent series of castings portraying himself, Hiro’s body has become more visible. In one piece in Bortolami’s exhibition, bronze mimics Hiro’s face, then descends down his wrinkled belly, ending up on his folded legs, an armless hand resting on a bent knee. They were created by pouring wax over his body, then letting it sit for about two hours to dry and cast in bronze. He called the process “very uncomfortable.”

Hiro has been working on a similar cast for some time. Before the pandemic, Hiro said, “I wanted to hide my face because I was interested in anonymity and the body itself.” But after contracting COVID-19 in 2020, and as Asian Americans faced an increase in hate crimes against their communities in the years that followed, Hiro knew he had to fully reveal himself.

These sculptures are not idealistic: they starkly display Hiro’s sagging flesh and imperfections. They are “always imperfect,” he said. “That’s how I look at my body.”

Correction, 10/24/25 at 5:35 pm: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Hiro received his MFA from CalArts, rather than UCLA.