Haroshi「I versus I」
I visited Haroshi’s solo exhibition “I versus I.” The venue is NANZUKA.
Haroshi, using techniques he self-taught from 2003, creates sculptural works and installations using scrap materials from skateboard decks.
This exhibition is a solo show gathering all-out new works themed on “the battle with oneself.”
The works exhibited this time are broadly composed of three series.
The “GUZO” series
The “GUZO” series is statue works serving as guardian deities for those who love skateboarding and its culture.
The flat work “Mosh Pit”
The “Mosh Pit” series is mosaic flat works that carve up used skate decks, rearrange them flat, and compose as painting the personal history of each skater and the totality of skateboard culture.
Soft-vinyl work series
This is a series of soft-vinyl works symbolizing affection for things that were restored and remodeled from old plastic-vinyl action figures, breathing new life into them to make them reborn.
「Mosh Pit, is a work that focuses on the beautiful, damaged appearance of a skateboard that has finished its role. A skateboard’s graphics are damaged (painted) into each form by the tricks a skater performs, and its beauty heads toward completion while at the same time heading toward its end. Just like a mosh pit, I have enclosed directly into the work, through the skateboard that is its very crystallization, the passion of skaters colliding with one another.
GUZO reveres the self-sacrificing spirit of the skateboard itself that has supported skaters, and is a divine statue that deifies it. The way a skateboard becomes damaged is dramatic—you could even call it “the passion of the skateboard”—and I felt I had to revive, as a god, the skateboard that gets damaged in our stead.
The soft-vinyl series, is a story in which the sofubi dolls—battered and broken after the fierce death-matches we waged with our own hands in sandboxes and bathrooms as children—are, now that we’re adults, repaired by skateboards to which we’ve dealt deep wounds in fierce death-matches on concrete, and the two damaged parties, complementing each other’s missing parts, evolve into a new form.” —Haroshi
