Hiro Ando

Hiro Ando was born in 1973 on the island of Shikoku in Japan. Hiro Ando started his career as an illustrator in 1995. In 2005 he founded with Saori Nakamishi an artist studio in Tokyo to manage the creation and promotion of other young neo-pop artists who express their own popular culture in their creations. Today the studio "Crazynoodles" has ten artists.

Hiro Ando is a versatile artist. He works in oil on canvas, digital media or video. His technique consists of making several sketches before painting on canvas. The painting shapes itself and emerges in the streets of Tokyo at night, and combines lots of colors and graphics. Hiro paints dark cityscapes and goldfish all over the canvas.

The marriage of the two subjects makes the whole of the painting dynamic and violent, with a strange feeling of eternity given by the goldfish which recall old Japanese paintings and watercolors. The sculpture is a recent addition to the media used by Ando, who started working on a series of orange, green sculptures ... inspired by Japanese popular culture. Thus the cat, which is a lucky charm in Japan, like the Maneki-Neko, takes different forms such as the samurai or the sumo wrestler.

The artist translates this theme into a modern style. The shiny and smooth materials, the vivid colors, the brutal but rounded shapes of Hiro Ando's sculptures take us to the world of manga in which the artist's generation grew up. Hiro Ando's art is the meeting between the Meiji era and Manga, he is Shogun in the world of Pokemon, he is traditional Japan seen through the eyes of young people: he certainly belongs to Japanese neo pop art.