After One Hundred Years—Taipei Portraits Piaopiao Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, September 2025
After One Hundred Years—Taipei Portraits
My father told me he was born in Taipei.
My family lived in Takasago, Hyogo Prefecture, where my parents had run a bakery shop for about ten years. When I was in elementary or middle school, my father would occasionally bring home canned mango, guava, or pineapple juice. One day, I asked him why he liked this tropical juice, and he told me he was born in Taipei and recalled the taste of the fruits he ate as a child. In connection with my solo exhibition at Piaopiao Gallery, I obtained the father's family register to confirm his official place of birth. According to the register, my father's birthplace was not in Taiwan, but in Japan, specifically in Ibusuki Village, Kagoshima Prefecture, in Kyushu. I knew that Ibusuki was my father's hometown. The register states that he was born on January 3, 1925, in the village, although the registration occurred in 1933. It is unusual to submit a birth report eight years after a birth. I believe that he had lived in Taiwan for eight years before his family returned to the village in Kagoshima.
In any case, there is no official record to prove that my father was born in Taipei. It's all just memories of the stories my father told me. I also assume he was born in Taiwan because my father opened a Chinese restaurant after closing the bakery. I never asked him why, but now it might have been because of the taste of the food from his childhood. I also recall him making pork buns at home from time to time.
As an artist, personal memory is the primary material for creating work. In this exhibition, I used the Taipei landscapes I photographed and the canvas I buried in the garden of the gallery’s owner, Mr. Peng, during my stay in Taipei last May. I combined them with the manipulated lines and dots derived from some drawings I created while in Taipei and other drawings I made at various places on January 3, 2011, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025. I conceive each of these combined works as a "portrait" evoked by memories between my father and me, as well as between Taipei and me.
Text/ Toru Hayashi
These Also Portraits, Store Front, Tokyo, September 2025
These Also Portraits, Store Front, Tokyo, September 2025
In "These Also Portraits," Hayashi selected eight works from the Store Front’s collection and exhibited them in combination with his “phonetic reading” works.
Selected artists: Christian Boltanski, Risaburo Kimura, Daniel Spoerri, Allen Jones, Arman, Christo, and Yaacov Agam
Christian Boltanski
Risaburo Kimura
Christo
Allen Jones
Yaacov Agam
Arman
Arman
Daniel Spoerri
15 Strokes, Studio Lieven De Boeck, Brussels, September 2024
In his installation “I am a Queer Loop,” Hayashi explores the concept of a 3-by-3 magic square composed of the numbers 1 to 9. This installation features nine pieces, including a central sketchbook titled “Sketchbook Vol.113” of “Equivocal Landscape.” Each artwork, linked to nine drawings created in Hawaii and New York between May 1 and May 9, 2024, corresponds to one of these numbers.
The magic square’s appeal lies in its structure, where each row, column, and diagonal sums to 15. This number holds personal significance for Hayashi, as his full name in Chinese characters contains 15 strokes. Inspired by the square’s mathematical elegance and its connection to his identity, Hayashi named his installation “I am a Queer Loop,” echoing the themes of self-reference found in Douglas Hofstadter’s book “I Am a Strange Loop.”
DAY ONE/September 11 2024
DAY TWO/September 12 2024
DAY THREE/September 13 2024
DAY FOUR/September 14 2024
DAY FIVE/September 15 2024
WHERE I AM, Store Front, Tokyo, October 2023
Memory Lane, Nairs Lab, Scuol, Switzerland, August 2023
Savorscape, The Gallery, New York, August - September 2021
T*A*K*A out of Business
TAKA, New York, July 1997, Space Performance
Hayashi used the Japanese restaurant TAKA in Greenwich Village, New York, where he was then employed, for the duration of its holiday closure. He sat in the dining room and whited out the letters T, A, K, A as they appeared in this order in the pages of the Business section of that day's New York Times for ten days. Hayashi started at 5 p.m. and ended at 11:00 p.m., which was the same business hours as Taka's. He used the background music by Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland and dressed himself in a pair of short cut-up jeans, a white T-shirt, a pair of black shoes, and a blue baseball cap.
