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, gurgling bubbles, fairy rings, explosions, and voluptuous vortices. However, similes are only temporary anchors in the artist’s vast proliferation of tiny circles.
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Doi’s process begins and ends with a Pilot .005 DR archival drawing pen—the ink of which seeps precisely into the bark fibers of handmade Japanese paper, often “Washi” paper from the 360-plus-year-old OZU WASHI STORE in Tokyo. With these simple materials, the artist produces three-dimensional effects through nuanced patterns that conglomerate and disseminate, weaving concentric and aleatory sections that interact rhythmically. Despite their obsessive detail, these drawings always seem to “breathe” within their pictorial space, either through encapsulated lacunae or a sparsely speckled perimeter. Their impressionistic texture, as well as the fact that all Doi’s pictures—even those depicting a nucleus—are unconstrained by perspective, create the sensation that we are looking at something irradiating a perceptible energy field or momentarily crossing the sheet of paper and about to leave it shortly.
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This notion of flux is the heart of Doi’s output; 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. Marking paper with ink then 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.
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Concurrently on view in Gallery One:
N.P. Viola's Newspaper Girls
Visit the online viewing room here.
