Yu Hirai Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1963 -

With a sort of color reportage of her existence, Yu Hirai fixes in images the experience of a life lived between Japan and several European countries (Belgium, Spain, Germany, France) in which, however, a spatial vision of reality is cancelled out in favor of a standardization of the world. Her reflections on what is important in human life pass through banal and everyday events, the experience of her living abroad, and her story finishes by constructing the universal theme of comprehending the contemporary world.

Her works oscillates between two worlds: the everyday and the fantastic, inside and outside of reality. The situations created in her photographic work, between fiction and autobiography, immerse us in an uncertain and transitory space. And this tension is reinforced by a chromatic duality: red and blue oppose external space, distant and often disquieting, with the artist's interior world, more familiar and reassuring.

The images in Yu Hirai's photographs are not portraits but become as icons, every featureless face can become ours and define our relationship with the world.

Yu Hirai was born in Tokyo in 1963. From 1983 she has lived in Europe. From 1985 to 1989 she lived in Belgium, frequenting the Ecole Supérieure de Beaux Arts La Cambre in Brussels, training in design. From 1990 to 1993 she lived in Barcelona and from 1994 to 1999 in Berlin, where she began to work with photography. From 2000 to 2001 she lived in Dublin, and in 2002 moved to Paris, where she currently lives.

She has held various shows, both individual and collective, in Europe, including Next Generation / Art Contemporaine d'Asie at the Galerie Passage de Retz in Paris and in Japan, including The Future of Paintings at the Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Future Recollections at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and Mysterious Visitors from the Land of Ephémère at the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier of Paris. She has participated in international art fairs such as Art Basel and the FIAC of Paris.
She has won scholarships associated with such important institutions as the Cité Internationale des Arts of Paris and the Irish Museum of Modern Art of Dublin. Her work is included in important public collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.