Hashimoto Yutaka

Life and training

Hashimoto Yutaka, whose name also appears in the western order as Yutaka Hashimoto, was born in Osaka in 1979 and still lives and works there. He studied at the Osaka College of General Design and afterwards at Kyoto Saga University of Arts, and has exhibited and taken prizes in Japan, Korea, Taipei and New York. He lists influences on both sides of the world: Genpei Akasegawa, On Kawara and Shinro Ohtake alongside Henri Matisse, David Hockney and Francis Bacon, together with the cartoonists Osamu Tezuka, Fujiko Fujio and Walt Disney.

Null

Almost everything he makes carries the word Null in its title. The figure it names is, in his own words, a character which looks familiar but has actually never existed. It is kept deliberately ambiguous so that a viewer supplies the rest, and what they supply is the point: he argues that the reading comes out of race, religion, culture and personal background, and that the same blank face is completed differently by different people. Null translates roughly as zero or nothing, and he connects it to the Japanese idea of mu. The artist has said that he wants people to forget their invisible barriers and borderlines, whether of race, gender, religion or ideology, and to feel that they exist as one living mass of flesh for as long as they are looking at the work.

Repetition as method

The second half of the project is aimed at himself. By painting the same figure over and over, he is working to find and wear away his own biases, and he treats the question of whether repetition produces bias as something to be tested rather than answered. Whole series are built on this: sets of a hundred unrelated portraits, runs titled after a repetitive movement that follows his own rules, and the long sequence of works asking whether appearance produces bias. He has described taking the idea of the graffiti throw up, the fast repeated tag, and turning it into something closer to a science.

Materials and the Muybridge paintings

He works most often in black and white, painting the same lines again and again across a surface, and uses spray paint and house paint alongside oil and acrylic, with charcoal more recently. One extended group of paintings takes its imagery from Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies published as The Human Figure in Motion, the sequences in which a walking or running body is broken into consecutive frames. Muybridge's figures are already anonymous bodies stripped of identity and repeated across a grid, which makes them an unusually exact source for a practice about repetition and about the absence of a face. The house has offered a canvas from that group, a study numbered within the series, which sold within its estimate range.

What a specialist examines

The output divides into unique canvases and signed print editions, and the two sit at quite different levels, so establishing which is in hand comes first. The works are identified by series title and number rather than by an ordinary title, and that number, along with the dimensions and the medium, is what pins a piece down; the imagery repeats by design and will not distinguish one work from another. Print editions have been issued through galleries in Britain and Japan as well as through an editions publisher, and documentation from whichever of those issued a given sheet is the useful record. On the canvases the painted black line is laid over a pale ground and abrasion shows readily, so the surface deserves a careful look in raking light before a valuation is given.