Kiyo Hasegawa

Landscape is an open and vulnerable canvas for external factors: erosion, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, land development, pollutions and so on. Different climates reform and reshape nature day by day. The changes often affect and influence people's perception towards their own actions and the way of living and how they interlink together. Berger (1972) states 'We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.'

The artist Kiyo Hasegawa represents the landscape of her mind through her abstract depiction. She is fascinated with the unique wet atmosphere often seen and felt in Japanese landscape. Just as Japanese people are adept at adjusting to suit a social situation, Kiyo believes that they also intuitively understand and sensitively interact with nature. Her approach is to depict the landscape not as it is seen, but as it exists in people’s inner spirit. Through this approach, she incorporate the internal and literal landscape into her paintings to bring the beholders within them.
By using traditional Japanese painting techniques such as gold leafing and Japanese brushwork, her paintings offers the audience calmness, abundance, tranquility and imagination.

Kiyo Hasegawa was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1984. She received her MFA in Fine Art Painting from Tama Art University in Tokyo. She has held several solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Kyoto, Helsinki and London and has participated in group exhibitions throughout Japan.