Yutaka Hatta (1930 - ), based in Fukui Prefecture, began his career as a painter in the early 1950s. Despite losing his faculty of sight in the 1980s, he has continued his creative production by employing his aural and tactile senses. As a core member of Hokubi Bunka Kyokai (Hokubi Cultural Association) and after the organization’s dissolution, he has continued to be a guiding force emphasizing the importance of arts and culture movements in rural communities.

Post-World War II, a myriad of avant-garde art movements emerged primarily in urban areas across Japan influenced by the influx of new information from abroad. In this cultural environment, Hatta sought an expression distinct from these popular artistic movements, such as Art Informel, with a determination to utilize materials found in the Japanese milieu to conceive of a new art, which he endeavored to realize through painting. From the mid-1960s, he veered away from conventional artistic materials such as canvas, paint, and paintbrush and began to produce geometric figures based on circles, a nod to Japanese emblems. His unique technique involved engraving on pulp boards or metal plates with a drill or chisel, creating pictorial spaces where the image’s inorganic nature coexists with the engraved lines’ writhing materiality. His works have garnered acclaim through numerous awards and exhibitions, such as the 9th Shell Art Award (1965, third place) and his participation in the Trends in Contemporary Japanese Painting and Sculpture exhibition (1966, The Kyoto Annex Museum of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo). Since he began working with sensory faculties other than sight, he has created colorful tableaus, guided by the sound of dripping paint, the culmination of chance phenomenon and control based on aural sense. To this day, he continues his artistic production focused on tactility and materiality with his works using kozo, a raw material used to make mulberry paper.

This exhibition features Hatta’s engraving works from the 1960s to the 1980s, one of the crowning achievements of his long career, his tableau works from the 1990s, and kozo works from the late 1990s to the 2000s. This diverse body of work introduces Hatta’s singular pictorial world, crystalized through direct engagement when material, image, and action culminate to transcend the arbitrariness of sight.