Born in 1980, Hiro Kurata was raised in both Japan and the US. His back-and-forth upbringing caused him to develop an affinity for the countries’ shared pastime of baseball, which he claims has helped him communicate across both cultures. His obsession with the sport gave birth to a character he calls the “Baseball Slugger,” the hero and center of his surreal scenes. His paintings, from the color palette to each brush stroke, are chaotic, confusing, and twisted—an obvious reflection on the world’s current condition. But there is one important difference between our reality and Hiro’s depiction of it: The latter doesn’t make us want to commit suicide via autoerotic asphyxiation while slitting our wrists, and in that sense we’d say he’s a definite success.
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