HIDETAKA SUZUKI

Born in Hokkaido in 1986 and currently lives in Tokyo. Painter. Completed the Master’s Course in Oil Painting at the Musashino Art University Graduate School of Art and Design.

In 2009, he received the Golden Acrylic Award at GESIAI#13 organized by Takashi Murakami, and in 2021, he was selected by Emilia Yin, Founder and Director of Make Room, for Foundwork’s Guest Curators Program. He was also selected for ArtConnect’s Artists to Watch ’21. In recent years, he has exhibited internationally, including a solo show at ACKERMAN CLARKE in Chicago, an online solo show at Edel Assanti in London, and participation in the NADA Miami art fair.

I was fascinated at a certain point in my life with finding family photos on the internet. I was attracted to the sense of guilt and the strange feeling of being able to see other people’s private photos, which I had nothing to do with. Things opened up in front of me that I would never usually have the chance to see. Once I reblogged a family photo on Tumblr that was probably from overseas, and there was a comment on it. It was a comment in English. It was an angry “Why do you have my father’s picture? Delete it immediately”.

Of course, I did not upload this photo. Nor do I own it. It was a photo taken somewhere, uploaded to the internet by someone else, and for whatever reason, it showed up on my dashboard. If I deleted the post, the data would never disappear from the internet, but I immediately deleted that reblog. When I read the comments, I felt an eerie sensation as if I was suddenly touched by something damp and caught a glimpse of a gaze from out of nothing. Something supposed to be fiction was somehow connected to reality and haunting me. The place I believed to be safe was, from the other side, just within their reach.