Born in 1946 in Nagoya, Japan, Hiroyuki Doi, a former chef, started making art in the 1980s after the death of his younger brother from a brain tumor. What originated as a therapeutic requiem, has since become a mysterious, self-renewing act of abstract mapping that can be re-contextualized in multiple ways.
Doi’s practice—which he describes as each piece evolving spontaneously until it finds its form—is very much akin to improvisational music, taking off from a few basic riffs to be created as it happens.
We can think of individual works as interconnected, fluid sequences that can take the shape of galaxies and cosmic dust formations; undulating cyclones, storms, and landmasses adrift; coral reefs, microscopic pools, strings of pearls, and honeycombs; gurgling bubbles, fairy rings, explosions, and voluptuous vortices. Yet smiles are always temporary anchors within Doi’s scrupulous proliferation of circles.
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All works:
Untitled, 2020 (only HDY 2023: 2013)
Ink on paper.
18 x 15 in. (45.7 x 38.1 cm)
$6,500 ea. -
Doi produces three-dimensional effects through rhythmic patterns of conglomeration and dissemination; weaving concentric and aleatory sections of effervescent orbs with others so small, partial, and condensed that they blend into obscurity.
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As we follow these nuanced progressions, we soar and sink while the whole arrangement builds organically upon itself. For Doi, this process begins and ends with a Pilot .005 DR archival drawing pen—the ink of which seeps precisely into the bark fibers of handmade sheets of unglazed Japanese “Washi” paper from the 365 plus-year OZU WASHI STORE in Tokyo.
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The notion of flux is the heart of Doi’s oeuvre; his works seem not so much vessels for a given substance as embodiments of an ongoing quest for equilibrium. In this way, the artist captures the tension between chance and intentionality; the amorphous and the distinct; transience and eternity.
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Marking paper with ink becomes a philosophical action, where the gesture of the circle comprises the Zen “ensō” (implying completeness and non-conceptual clarity), the cross-cultural symbol for the cycle of time, the slight gateways between the visible and the invisible, and Doi’s metaphysical, unrelenting, fixation on the osmosis between the minuscule fragment and the whole; from unicellular life to the universe.
