When trying to write about Hiroyuki Hamada, I found myself without proper words. For months I tried to sit down and focus in on the work. Exploring all the usual avenues one would take when approaching an art piece: cultural, historical, philosophical, formal, personal, I found myself with a notebook full of random notes and streams of thought, but nothing clear and binding.

Then it dawned on me, that Hamada was an amalgamation of everything I thought about and wrote down while thinking about single, distinct patterns of meaning. I had deciphered and scoured all that was in front of me, being etched out, drilled in, painted over, layer upon layer, slapped down, smoothed out, affixed, blended, hammered together and hung. The artist and the art were telling me a story.

It was in his background that I found the key. As a kid, uprooted from suburban Japan to a steel town in West Virginia.  Hamada went from being in the majority in Japan to being an extreme minority displaced from his cultural roots knowing little English. He found refuge in art. He found communication in line, tone and shape. He turned frustration, anger, confusion and desperation into the abstract. Hamada experimented with texture and surface, then eventually taking the work more sculptural at the same time still considering the work paintings. These elements, tied in with years of trying various materials and substances became about finding the solution to what his mind and his eyes were seeing. Like struggling to find the perfect word, Hamada was constructing painted objects with layer upon layer of misunderstanding and eventual cohesion.

Hamada’s work is about communicating, the construction of a language in line, form, color, and alteration, sometimes savage, sometimes methodical. Written over years of doubt, elation, self-abuse and happiness.