Artist Statement
Both in my sculptural and socially engaged installations, I create an environment where viewers would face conflicting issues and questions to ponder through their sensory experiences. In each installation, disjunction emerges between choices of materials, aesthetics, human actions and sociopolitical contexts. I begin my process by focusing on personal and social dissonances, such as refugee experiences in the United States, then start my project with a fundamental question that all of us share. Expanding the initial question, I set up a participatory installation that generates further questions for the viewers to grapple with. My background in Clinical Psychology and my challenging experience of immigration hugely influenced the development of my methodology.
My installation is designed to instigate the viewers’ visceral, sensory and intimate experience of others. As its format, it often gives a space with physical structures constructed with a specific material and the documentation of the actions of others. I sometimes bring people into my installation to spark a direct encounter. By orchestrating multiple media such as video, sound, light, text and especially carefully crafted materials, I try to inspire, among the viewers, a heightened sensory experience that allows them empathetically bridge between their senses of “we” and “others,” the inside and the outside.
Music has become a tool to represent the way we balance our conflictive experiences through our lives, giving us the ideas of conflict and harmony. The integration of them allows a poetic transformation of our desire and vulnerability to a larger culture of connections. By inviting people into my installations, I like to encourage them to observe themselves and others, to consider never-ending cycles of conflict and resolution, and to participate in a conversation continuously with others.
June, 2025
Biography
Taro Hattori is an interdisciplinary artist who has shown his installations and socially engaged projects nationally and internationally. His recent work often creates relationships between physical sculpture and space with people with a specific socio-political background through their performances, conversations and singing. He has been a recent recipient of a grant from Creative Work Fund, Pyllis C Wattis Foundation, California Arts Council, Art Matters Foundation NY, Zellerbach Foundation, Center for Cultural Innovation and others. He has been awarded a residency fellowship from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, The de Young Museum, Kuandu Art Museum in Taiwan and others. He is currently teaching at California College of the Arts as the chair of Sculpture and Individualized Programs.