Dog Days Painting

Born in Hyogo Prefecture Japan. Lived and worked in Brooklyn New York since 1994. Lives and works in Tokyo Japan since 2016 Frog's Eye by Gen Hikage by Shinichi Segi (Art critic, AICA member) 　Paintings are usually made with a viewpoint set slightly higher or lower, according to needs, than the height of the painter's eye. For example, nature in a higher place like the sky or mountain, or divine images in a high position like the gods and Buddha, will be painted with an extremely high viewpoint; however, we could conclude that paintings with an extremely low viewpoint are very rare except those with particular cases of necessity. Considering the fact of art history, Hikage's paintings with an extremely low angle as if looked up from on the ground are very unusual, and can be accepted as very unique. There, you feel no artificiality, exaggeration, or nastiness, which undoubtedly indicates that the painter has only discovered the viewpoint after he built up his authentic backgrounds of art studies and cultivation as a man. The world of the image Hikage has developed over 30 years or so since his fist solo exhibition in the 1980s is forming a certain domain of art so that such a vindication is not necessary at all. Making a scene stop without losing its dynamism, he has succeeded in depicting a reality of our life that can neither be captured with paintbrush nor with a camera. There, you rarely find artificial, distorted, or fictional sophistication, but rather, you sense that the painter's emotion is strangely naive and refreshing. Writing so far about his work, I am reminded of a Greek sophist, the origin of sophistication, of the 5th Century, and his famous aphorism "Flying arrow is not flying." Reconsidering today's advanced physics, the aphorism, though being regarded as a completely absurd paradox for long time, is no sophism or anything, but rather contrarily, it can be understood as a truth: the logic can be applied to Hikage's unique manner of painting. Seeing again his paintings, the viewpoint, categorized as "frog's eye"(angle of looking up) in contrast to "bird's eye" (angle of looking down) in reference to composition of painting, represents that the painter is looking up at the human world of man and woman from a point literally at the height of "frog's eye." "What? Frog?"...I asked myself like that, and tried referring to Dictionary of English and Japanese Imagery (ed. by Tetsuji Akasofu, Sanseido).