Seven years ago, Naotaka Hiro was at the airport in Los Angeles when he received a harrowing text from his wife. “There’s someone underneath the house,” she wrote. “Someone’s coughing.” He abruptly canceled his flight to Japan and rushed home to his panicked spouse. Hiro ventured into the crawlspace beneath his home—and found nobody there at all. Perhaps it was a racoon, he thought to himself. But then he noticed a blanket.
“Someone had been there,” he told me recently, showing no sign that the memory induced any anxiety.
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Rather than fleeing in fear, as most might, Hiro stuck around, intrigued by the thought that this claustrophobic crawlspace had acted as someone’s makeshift home. “I was like, Wow, this is so uncomfortable,” Hiro said. “But then, after 30 minutes, I was like, This must be okay. It was moist, quiet, and cold. I heard the sound of the other side: my dogs running around, my wife and son’s voices.” He compared the experience to being underneath the world.
This all provided the fodder for some of his recent paintings, which he produces by suspending his canvas just 13 inches above his body—the exact height of the crawlspace of his LA home. Working alone in his studio, without the help of any assistants, Hiro lies supine and then proceeds to paint astonishing abstractions. Filled with forms variously resembling green plants, silvery fish gills, and necrotic veins, these paintings are part of Hiro’s ongoing quest to make sense of what goes on inside himself. “My body is always in contact with the surface,” he said.
Hiro’s latest creations—on view at Bortolami gallery in New York through November 1—are not abstract paintings in the conventional sense. As with many of his recent works, the canvases are not stretched or mounted on an easel during their production. Instead, he often slices holes through his canvases and puts his body through these apertures, essentially allowing him to be in his paintings as he is making them. Most of the works in this show also have ropes attached; Hiro used them to wrap the canvas around himself, affording him the ability to paint not just the areas in front of himself, but also in the spaces behind, to his sides, and all around.
Naotaka Hiro with his 2025 painting Untitled (Solvent).
Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews
He pointed to Untitled (Solvent), a 2025 painting made via that method. Its borders are threaded with purplish ropes that run off the canvas and onto the floor beneath, where they collect in loops. “This one is kind of like a 360-degree body scanner,” he said, smiling.
Hiro’s art functions on an unconventional wavelength, which may explain why he’s developed a cult reputation in LA, the city where he has been based since 1991. The artist, who once served as a studio assistant to Paul McCarthy, has appeared there in shows organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian, as well as in Made in L.A., the vaunted biennial run by the Hammer Museum.
Gradually, his work has risen in prominence outside LA, too. In 2024, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hung a recently acquired work by Hiro in its galleries alongside a painting by Joan Mitchell. Right now, Hiro’s work can be found in Roppongi Crossing, a recurring survey of Japanese contemporary art put on by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Misako & Rosen, the Tokyo-based gallery that has been showing Hiro since 2007, brought his work this week to Art Basel Paris.
Among Hiro’s fans is Koki Tanaka, the acclaimed Japanese artist who showed alongside Hiro early in his career. Tanaka said he remained impressed by the way that Hiro uses his art as a form of self-exploration. “He’s using his body to understand his body,” Tanaka said.
Naotaka Hiro, Sandwaves, Internally, Volume 1, 2025.
Courtesy the artist and Bortolami
Hiro’s beginnings were in film, not art. He was born in Osaka in 1972 and came to the US at age 18, barely able to speak English. He’d arrived in California with the intention of becoming a filmmaker, but, he recalled, “I didn’t have the courage to ask people to collaborate with me.” Feeling too modest to bring on actors and crew members, Hiro decided to go it alone.
He said he prized the sense, in his early solo productions, that “you don’t know what’s what anymore. Maybe I’m a performer or a director.” Moreover, he was interested in the twinned notions of “control and being controlled, seeing and being seen.”
Hiro was already storyboarding his films, as most filmmakers do. But soon, these preparatory drawings became props in his movies. That’s when he realized he might have been an artist all along. “You know, I never really wanted to become a painter,” he said. (This, despite the fact that Hiro has a B.A. in art from the University of California, Los Angeles; he later received his M.F.A. from CalArts.)
The artist’s first mature works owed something to McCarthy, the sculptor who served as Hiro’s undergraduate professor and later acted as his employer. Like McCarthy, Hiro seemed oddly enchanted by bodily functions that some might find disgusting. One video even featured close-up shots of him peeing, with his penis superimposed twice over, as a metaphor for the hands of a clock. Other works alluded to vomiting and defecation, acts that have also shown up in McCarthy’s abject art.
In one of the earliest profiles of Hiro, from 2007, curator Catherine Taft claimed that these works were influenced by Gutai, a Japanese avant-garde movement from the postwar era. The comparison has stuck, showing up repeatedly in reviews of Hiro’s art since then. It makes sense, in a way: Kazuo Shiraga, one of the leading Gutai artists, created a legendary 1955 performance called Challenging Mud, whose titular substance he smeared around with his hands. Works like that one have a distinctly corporeal quality, much as Hiro’s do; Shiraga was also from Osaka, just like Hiro. But Hiro told me that McCarthy introduced him to Gutai, which he never heard about while living in Japan.
Still, just like the Gutai artists, Hiro treats his paintings as something akin to performances. Of his art’s ties to Gutai, he had to concede: “Maybe there is a connection.”
Naotaka Hiro with his 2025 Bortolami show.
Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews
For some of his recent works, Hiro painted according to strict rules that were dictated in advance. To make them, he said, “I set the timer for one hour or two hours. Within that time, I do this movement. Then I stop, and I go back to the same position, and I do it again. I call them sessions.”
Then he put it another way: “I make a rule. I work within the rule. Then I break it.” He compared his working method to that of Bruce Nauman, an artist whose works have sometimes begun with simple gestures—sidling back and forth down an empty hallway, as he did for one 1968 piece called Walk with Contrapposto—that grow increasingly erratic as they are enacted over and over.
Hiro has rarely been so forthcoming about his own works, which he sometimes paints according to codes that are not readily disclosed to viewers. (One such code utilized in the Bortolami works included relating Hiro’s movements to different colors—red, yellow, and blue in one, just like “old video cables,” he said.) I told Hiro his art seemed closed off, as though there was a lot he didn’t want people to know about how he used his body in his art. Was he ever tempted to film himself producing his paintings? “I didn’t want to show the process that way, because it’s all here,” he said, alluding to the works all around him when we spoke at Bortolami.
Yet Hiro’s body has appeared more visibly in a recent series of casts depicting his own form. In one featured in the Bortolami show, the bronze mimics Hiro’s face before descending down his wrinkled stomach and culminating in his folded legs, with one armless hand depicted resting on a bent knee. They’re made by pouring wax across his body, then sitting still for about two hours to let it dry and casting it in bronze. He called the process “super uncomfortable.”
Naotaka Hiro, Plot, Rerouted, 2025.
Courtesy the artist and Bortolami
Hiro has been making similar casts for quite a while. Before the pandemic, Hiro said, “I wanted to hide my face, because I was interested in anonymity and the body by itself.” But after falling ill with Covid in 2020, and with Asian Americans facing a rise in hate crimes against their community in the years after, Hiro knew he had to reveal himself in full.
The sculptures are not idealized: they nakedly display Hiro’s sagging flesh and blemishes. They are “always imperfect,” he said. “That’s kind of how I see my body.”
Correction, 10/24/25, 5:35 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated where Hiro earned his M.F.A. It was CalArts, not UCLA.