Hirose Shoko

Graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, majoring in oil painting in 2018.
After graduation, he worked as a designer in the game industry, and now he works across the fields of art and illustration.

In modern times, we live simultaneously in the world as material and the world as data, and the boundary between these is already blurred. Digital images have a strong sense of reality even though they have no matter, and on the other hand, things that exist as matter are also consumed as information. Under such circumstances, production is centered around questions such as “what is reality” and “how is existence recognized.”

In production, a method of layering images as information and traces as matter on the same screen by outputting an image drawn in a digital environment to a support and adding material drawing such as oil paint or resin from above is used. The layers that occur on the screen are not simply visual structures; they also indicate the hierarchy of reality, fluctuating perceptions, and the state of the subject being reconstructed.

He is also active as an illustrator under the name “Hirose,” providing illustrations for domestic and international games, light novels, and works starting with Hatsune Miku. While going back and forth between visual expression in the commercial field and practice as a work of art, he explores the state of painting in the present day.