NANZUKA UNDERGROUND is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Noritoshi Hirakawa.

Hirakawa is a renowned conceptual artist who has been the subject of solo shows at Hermes Forum, Tokyo, Museum of Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp and Deitch Projects, NY. He has also been included in group exhibitions worldwide such as the Venice Biennale in 1994, and more recently at P.S.1 in New York, Leeum, Seoul and Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf. His works have been acquired by the collections at CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Through works such as “S”, in which he expressed the inevitability of man's attraction to and fear of death with photographs of the last view that each jumper might have seen, “The reason of Life”, in which he expressed women's suppressed sexual desires by having female models flash their undergarments in public, and “Dreams of Tokyo”, in which the contention between the Japanese social system and its people are elaborated by his images of squatting female figure that reveal discreetly that they are not wearing any underwear, Hirakawa challenges the paradoxes and taboos of the society and attempts to uncover the unchangeable truth.

In this solo exhibition, he focuses on the district of Shibuya, and through figures of young women that gather in the area, deliberates on the issue of communication between daughters and their parents in the present-day Japanese society. Today, many women lead lives which their parents are not fully aware of; meanwhile, the parents force superficial morals upon their children in an attempt to maintain a community which they call family. People do not realize that under this oppressive state, women who play the role of the daughter only lose sight of their real selves and sense of existence within the society. In this exhibition, he displays two series "A sense of accomplishment" and "A daughter’s proposal" that are “images of daughters that parents are unaware of, and figures of parents that recognize what the daughters are going through,” which Hirakawa believes to be the truest form of relationship that should take place between children and parents.

This series also addresses Hirakawa's concern towards recent events in Japan (of children busjacking and randomly attacking with knives in broad daylight to spite their parents, parents abusing children, children killing parents) that epitomize the collapse of communication between children and parents.

For this exhibition, Hirakawa states the following: "I believe the function of art is to question the essential meaning of human existence without being inhibited by social conventions and wary of the public eye, and through such perspective, to suggest a new, undeceitful way of life to the society at large."