#ColonizingGazes: From Landscapes, Cyberscapes to Mindscapes: Solo show featuring Takashi Horisaki | H Foundation for the Arts, San Marino, CA.
"We never look just at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves."
– John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
Takashi Horisaki presents his ceramic sculpture series, #InstaBonsai, that examines bonsai through the lens of social media, exploring and critiquing issues surrounding materiality and fluidity of cultural circulation, horticulture and the history of its aesthetics, and colonization in the new dimensionality of the current age.
The art of bonsai, originating in China as “penzai” and introduced to Japan in the 12th century, evolved across centuries into an emblematic form of Zen Buddhism and samurai refinement. In Japan’s Meiji to Taisho periods, bonsai was repurposed as a nationalist icon and propaganda instrument, embodying the complex interplay of cultural identity and aesthetic tradition. Horisaki’s *#InstaBonsai*, grounded in rigorous research, scrutinizes this colonial legacy, examining how nature is not merely appreciated but idealized and manipulated to align with cultural narratives.
Displayed on rotating displays that mimic a carefully curated retail setting, the sculptures emphasize the commodification of natural beauty while subtly invoking the environmental and historical fractures—colonialism, warfare, ecological degradation—that lie veiled beneath each carefully curated digital image. Crafted with a tactile, handmade approach, Horisaki’s works draw from Instagram imagery tagged with #bonsai and #盆栽, adopting a frontal, directed perspective that mirrors the structured gaze of digital visual culture. This gaze emerges from a place of unconscious conditioning, woven with commercial allure and impulses of colonization that traverse physical, digital, and psychological spaces.
In this manner, *#InstaBonsai* invites the viewer to confront both the seductive pull and underlying distortions of a world where our perceptions are increasingly pixelated, shaped by the intermediation of screens and the relentless drive to aestheticize and possess.
About the Artist
TAKASHI HORISAKI (b. 1974, Tokyo) is a sculptor and community-based artist, working across Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo. His work draws inspiration from architecture, urban planning, and material culture, exploring how our physical environment connects to issues of social inequality, community strength, migration, and cultural exchange. Using materials like latex, ceramics, and plastic, Horisaki molds and reshapes familiar objects, transforming their form, structure, or color to create symbols of our surroundings. His approach combines these objects with storytelling elements—captured in oral histories, photographs, social media posts, and augmented reality—inviting us to consider the role of physical spaces in a world where digital and physical experiences increasingly merge.
Horisaki’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including SPRING/BREAK Art Show (LA 2024, NY 2023, 2020, 2017, 2016, 2012), BankArt 1929’s R16 Studios in Yokohama (2018), Recess Soho (NY, 2014), the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2012), Sculpture Center (NY, 2012), Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Korea 2012), Deutsches Hygiene-Museum (Dresden, 2008), Prospect.1 Biennale (NOLA, 2008), and Queens Museum (NY, 2008). Currently, Horisaki is an artist-in-residence at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA.
