Masaru Shichinohe

Masaru Shichinohe, born in 1959 in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from Musashino Art University, College of Art and Design, major in architecture. After working in architectural firm for three years, he started his career as professional painter. The atmospheric pressure on Masaru Shichinohe’s planet also approaches zero. Apalpable stillness pervades his tableaus of young boys and girls, glassy-eyed rabbits, mechanical baubles, celestial bodies, led zeppelinds, and clocks eternally set at 12 o’clock. Even demonstrations of movement like the trajectory of a billiard ball are stopped in mid-air at different points in t, recalling the Italian Futurists’ experimentations with multiple exposure photography. They are stutters in Shichinohe’s otherwitse frictionless space. The post-war Japan Masaru Shichinohe experienced was rising through rapid economic growth, and by the 1980s, everything was highly ordered. As he says, “There was nothing to fight against.” He set aside his avant-garde views and aspirations to change society, and turned to the creation of a space for “whispers,” in a trajectory that in some way resembles the transition from the Meiji to the Taisho. Of course, different eras have different experiences and expressions, and on Shichinohe’s channel, these whispers or private narratives do not use the first person, but are instead retold through the object of the doll.