Hidemi Shimura // Japan
Hidemi Shimura is a Japanese artist based in Tokorozawa city, Japan. Her work maps distance and people as stratified in urban movement and relocation. Shimura graduated from the Musashino Art University in Tokyo with a degree in Fashion design and after working as an animator, began painting in a fine arts capacity.
Based in Shanghai from 2007 to 2014, she was influenced by the cosmopolitan city’s revolving door of foreigners rushing in and out and taking strands with them to far corners. As we formulate and detach, so do the cityscapes we once nested ourselves in, and Shimura’s work serializes the experience of urban revolution and individual movement inside that cycle. Distance is often treated as an afterthought today, when it does not directly impede communication as it did in the past. Still - relocation, even over short distance, can leave us disjointed and self-exiled.
Shimura creates “paintings” using coiling thread rather than paint. That practice is still canonical of her work - taking textile products to produce graphic images in a final product that settles somewhere near a painting. Shimura’s practice of collaborated practice of developing atypical relationships between her material and end-product underscores her passive view of “art” as a purpose or pursuit. Her main works, Silent Invaders, of which there are more than 200, incorporate palettes of coiled embroidery threads clustered in urban fashion onto horizontal bars of fabulous color, sometimes with barcodes running through the image - like a pantone palette for a city. The fine intricacy of her paintings and the domineering symbol-wielding (barcodes, for example, make everyone uncomfortable), would have you believe she is a neon-plated artisan techno-sorceress, and while that may be true, it is still just daily experience.
WhyWhyArt Exhibiting Artist
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erutuF | 2017 |