About

Gallery Baton presents POSTFOREST, a solo exhibition by Yuichi Hirako (b. 1982), from October 22 to December 5, 2026, at its exhibition space in Hannam-dong. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, Hirako has built a distinctive visual language centered on hybrid figures drawn from nature. This is the artist's third solo exhibition at Baton. Internationally recognized for an ecological imagination and messages of coexistence, Hirako uses new paintings and sculptures to reinterpret the forest as both a natural realm and a layered place where narrative, community, and anonymity intersect. Hirako grew up surrounded by nature in Okayama Prefecture, Japan. While studying in London, the artist noticed that urban green spaces, street trees, and indoor plants mostly exist for human rest and emotional comfort, and cannot grow according to their own natural principles. This modern tendency to objectify nature, rather than letting it exist in its own right, became a question running through Hirako's later work. Seeing nature as an independent being equal to humans also connects with the thinking of Deep Ecology. Rather than directly denouncing damaged nature, Hirako has expressed this belief gently and consistently through the visual language of painting and sculpture. Hirako's central narrative follows human-like figures living leisurely alongside other creatures in a forest on the far side of the Earth. Dogs, cats, other animals, and plants appear like supporting characters in a feature-length animation, conveying the situation in each scene, adding rhythm, and branching the narrative into smaller stories. In the large-scale installation Tree, Forest, Mountain, first shown in the 2025 solo exhibition ORIGIN at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art and presented again at Art Basel Unlimited in 2026, the artist filled a circular platform with hybrid sculptures to form a clustered landscape. Arranged in a circle, the sculptures gaze at viewers in the center, not as nature in an anonymous background but as beings equal to humans. By having humans and nature, long arranged for human use, face each other at eye level, the work returns them to a horizontal relationship. In this exhibition, the artist extends that relationship vertically, presenting suspended sculptures for the first time. Occupying one section of the gallery from top to bottom, the work scatters sculptures of different sizes and shapes through the air, unlike earlier works clustered on the floor. Instead of facing the works from a fixed viewpoint, visitors walk among the floating forms. In this experience, similar to passing through a forest, the gallery becomes a place that responds to the visitor's body. The title POSTFOREST reflects the artist's historical view: just as human ways of seeing and defining nature have fundamentally changed over the past century, the relationship between nature and humans will keep being reshaped in the future. Hirako accepts this change as a natural transition rather than rupture or loss, and has developed the work with relationships yet to form in mind. The exhibition reflects on the present relationship between nature and humans and invites visitors to consider the direction of coexistence to come.