imura art gallery, kyoto
Closes July 23
Ceramics artist Takashi Hinoda (b. 1968) creates freakish figures whose limbs are stretched and mashed, and re-coagulated in weird and fantastical ways. The legs of Hinoda's "To Consume the World" (2011), for example, support not a torso but a giant gaping mouth full of nasty-looking teeth. As his ceramics are inspired by manga, anime and American comics, it's not surprising that he was coupled with fellow artist Takashi Murakami in the two-man show "Takashi+2: East Meets East Takashi Murakami and Takashi Hinoda," at the Casa Nova Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2006. Despite appearances, though, Hinoda is an altogether different species.
"Alternative Muscles," a show of his recent work at Kyoto's imura art gallery, is his first solo exhibition in two years. The title refers to the evolutionary process of organisms' adaptation to the environment to become humans. If that process had been disturbed, however, skin, bones and muscles might have taken very different forms in subsequent metamorphoses. Hinoda's current works offer a drastic reformulation of bodies akin to when fish sprouted legs and went ashore for the first time.