Resident of Yao City, Yasuhiro Hirata (born 1984 in Higashi Osaka) has been attending Atelier Hiko in Hirano-ku, Osaka City since he was a second-year Junior High School student. He currently visits once a week to make works.
Hirata used to repeatedly paint figures side on and tools from the construction site where his father worked (including caulking guns, nails and paint cans).
He started creating his cylinder pieces when his father happened to bring a cardboard tube home in 2004, a time of turbulent changes such as graduating from special school and his grandmother’s passing. Their unstable curved surfaces have countless nails driven in at fixed intervals, with circles painted around them. According to Hirata, he feels like he’s making his favourite food, corn on the cob. He continued to be engrossed in these corn-on-the-cob works for almost 10 years before slowing to a pace of a single nail or two each day, but the state of emergency stay-at-home declaration announced during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 revived his drive to create.
