The Anonymous Body: Naotaka Hiro in Conversation

When Naotaka Hiro moved from Osaka to Los Angeles to begin filmmaking, he realised that directing a crew without speaking the language was not easy. Determined to continue, he turned filmmaking inward, working as both actor and director in a series of experimental early works. Fixated on the dilemma that one cannot see the totality of one’s own body with one’s own eyes, Hiro’s films, paintings, and sculptures seek to capture both the anxiety and wonder of this condition by closing the gap he terms ‘The Unknown’. We speak following several major recent exhibitions, including Roppongi Crossingsat the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and Painting Paintingsat Museum of Modern Art, New York, where a work from the museum’s permanent collection was placed in dialogue with a monumental canvas by Joan Mitchell. Meeting ahead of his exhibition Others across both Herald St galleries in London, we discussed his fluid movement between mediums, and the rituals central to his work; what he learned from working with Paul McCarthy and Takashi Murakami in his early years; and his desire to return to filmmaking.

Laurie Barron: I think the obvious place to start is with your early influences. What made you want to become an artist?

Naotaka Hiro: I always liked drawing, but for a long time I wanted to be a filmmaker. I watched tons of films when I was in Japan, and growing up I wanted to become a director. I moved to the United States when I was 18 and started college there. I wanted to major in film, but filmmaking was difficult for me because I could barely speak English, which made things like organising a crew almost impossible. So I ended up making films entirely by myself. I would film myself with a camera on a tripod, acting and directing at the same time, constantly moving back and forth between those two roles. That became my style, and ultimately had a huge influence on my art-making.

LB: What kinds of films were you watching? Presumably quite experimental? 

NH: I watched everything: Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, Kenneth Anger – all kinds of classic cinema, from Hollywood films to more experimental ones. 

LB: How did you end up working for Paul McCarthy, and what was that experience like? 

NH: Paul McCarthy was my professor at UCLA and I ended up working with him for 20 years. At first, I didn’t even know what kind of work he made. It was pre-internet, and there weren’t many publications available. I started showing my work in class – video pieces and photography – and he said, ‘Oh, we have something in common.’ Then I started looking at his work more closely, and there definitely was something shared there in relation to the body, and also to food, which I was using a lot at the time. Paul encouraged me to become an artist and became more of a mentor. He introduced me to a lot of Gutai, Butoh, and postwar Japanese art, all of which was new to me because I hadn’t had an art education in Japan. When I first encountered Gutai, I was shocked because the way they used the body – and materials like rope – had a lot in common with my own work. It was also Paul who introduced me to Takashi Murakami, who was still up-and-coming at the time and working out of an old shed, with a few assistants sleeping on the floor. It was fun to spend time with him then because you could feel that everything was still to come, and he was also doing a lot of performance work at the time. Both of them were incredibly open – open to any medium.

LB: I was reading about your early films, like Elephant (1996), in which you – almost dangerously – wrapped yourself in cling film alongside a stuffed elephant, using a tube to breathe. You describe this notion of ‘The Unknown’, which was important to you then and seems to have continued throughout your career. Could you talk a bit about that?

NH: I usually work by putting my body into contact with a material in order to leave traces of movement, so that the artwork has a life-size relationship to me. It comes from a simple dilemma: I cannot directly see my own body with my own eyes. There is anxiety in that condition, but at the same time a sense of wonder. The work is a way of approaching that gap, which I call ‘The Unknown’. When you look in a mirror or at a photograph, you see yourself, but it’s actually only a representation. The same thing happens with a recorded voice: when you hear it, it sounds strange – not like the voice you imagine as your own. For me, making art is a way of approaching that gap. When I started out, I would photograph or film myself. Then I began casting my body, as another way of seeing myself. Later, I started rubbing my body against materials like canvas in order to record movement and different positions. Eventually, I began throwing myself against wooden panels to leave impact traces.

LB: I’m interested in how you began using canvas in such a bodily way. Traditionally, you think of the artist in the studio with a canvas on an easel, sitting down, engaged in a relatively still act – the canvas itself is usually static. Whereas your work, building on the legacy of action painting, postwar Japanese body-based practices, and Abstract Expressionism, involves a much more physical, performative process – could you talk about how this arrived? 

NH: To make my paintings, I use lots of drawings, almost like storyboards for filmmaking, though they don’t contain any narrative. They’re more like diagrams made up of fragments – body parts and poses – that guide me. They begin as tiny pieces of paper or notebook sketches that eventually become life-size paintings. Originally, I started by tracing my body directly onto paper. I would lean against it and trace my positions and movements. After a while, the scale increased to around six feet, and as I rubbed against the paper it would tear and wrinkle, which I really didn’t like. So I started using canvas instead. You can wrap canvas all the way around your body, 360 degrees, and it’s much stronger. I like the way you can respond to its bumps and wrinkles, and because it’s so sturdy you can really push your force into the surface. More recently, I’ve also been making works on wooden panels. I started using them when I wanted to experiment with a harder surface. A wooden panel is almost like a flatbed scanner, whereas canvas is more like a full-body scanner – with wood, you have to push much more actively against the surface.

LB: You work in these two-hour, intense ‘sessions’, as you call them, right? I presume you don’t pre-envisage how a work will look in the end – it’s a generative process?

NH: I call the two-hour period a ‘session’ and set a timer. When I hear the alarm, I stop. I started doing this because I like to keep my movement or action clean, without much correction or touch-ups. I like having rules and limitations because they encourage me to react to the material, creating obstacles intentionally. But then all these rules – and I have tons of them – I always end up breaking in some way, like you might in sport or a game.

LB: Do you ever make mistakes? How do you respond to them? 

NH: Sometimes I intentionally push towards mistakes. With my rules and limitations, I can’t resist it – mistakes become part of the whole process. And then at the same time I don’t like mistakes, which actually makes me a little depressed in a way, but I have to work with it. I don’t like it, but that’s how I keep working: I make the mistake and either resolve it or leave it as it is.

LB: I think this is a good moment to talk about your sculpture and the work that will be in the Herald St show. I also wanted to ask about your choice of materials.

NH: The metals I use are bronze, previously aluminium, and now stainless steel (in Lump 1, 2026), sometimes with an added patina, although the choice of metal is not so important. Initially, I wanted to make a kind of body instrument, similar to a gong, so I was banging them and producing sound. But now they are different: like a two-hour durational piece that can be eternalised. I like how ancient Roman and Greek bronze sculptures are found in the ocean and how they seem to live forever. With my sculptural work, my actions and my body can similarly live forever.

LB: It’s interesting because you mentioned to me previously that, despite their life-casting process, you don’t consider them to be self-portraits.

NH: Yes, my body is the tool, but it’s not self-expression. It’s not like traditional self-portraiture in the sense of expressing one’s feelings or emotions. It’s more that I use my body to do something. It’s not representation, self-expression, self-finding, or anything particularly personal. Perhaps it can be read as a self-portrait in a broader sense, because I am using my body, but it’s not really about myself. I used to hide my face, or not show my cultural background. I didn’t want it to be read as ‘this is about me as an Asian artist’ or tied to a specific cultural identity. I was only interested in the anonymous body. But around 2020, during COVID, with the rise in anti-Asian sentiment and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, I started using my face to show who I am. Even so, I still consider the face a body part, the same as the hands, arms, and legs.

LB: In many of your works, recognisable phenomena such as scales, hands, and veins reappear. Is this unconscious or intentional?

NH: It is intentional. I lean my body against a surface and trace it. Sometimes you see more detail, and other times more blurred movement, so it becomes more abstract. If I stay longer, like with the finger positions moving up or down – you get this elongated finger. In some works you see eye-like marks, almost like star shapes, and that’s when my nose, eyes, nipples, or genitals have pressed against the surface. The scale-like patterns come from these specific waving motions. They are meditative – a kind of buffering state, like a thinking mode. People compare them to net-like patterns, but I think of them more like reptile skin. It protects from the outside, but also retains something internally.

LB: I also want to return to this idea of how your practice relates to meditation. I read that you have a ritual of scanning and speaking to each part of your body, from head to toe, for 10–15 minutes before working.

NH: It’s more about knowing my body. I am very conscious of my body, because I use it in many different ways to make my work. Then, during the time I had COVID and was stuck in the studio, I really had to re-evaluate how I worked, as my body was not functioning properly. So before I start working, I sit and think about my body, close my eyes, check my breathing, posture, blood flow – it’s quite meditative, although I didn’t think of it that way at the time. Body scanning is a meditation practice for other people, but I didn’t know that when I started. But I have to do it before I begin working.

LB: Do you have any unrealised or dream projects?

NH: I started as an experimental filmmaker, and when I’m making all of this two-dimensional sculpture I still feel like I’m making a film, because I have pre-production, a storyboard, production, and post-production. But in the future I would actually like to make a film. I’m not sure if I would hire actors or be on my own, but it would probably still relate to moving images, performance, and the body. 

LB: Amazing! Full circle moment impending…



Naotaka Hiro: Others runs from 30 May until 1 August at Herald St and Herald St Museum St, London. In September 2026, Hiro will participate in the Toronto Biennial of Art. 



Feature image: Naotaka Hiro, Crossing, Volume 1, 2026. © Naotaka Hiro. Courtesy of the artist and Herald St, London & Bologna. Photo by Elliot Jack Edwards