Hiromichi Matsudaira

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

Hiromichi Matsudaira is a Japanese visual artist, born in Tokyo and based in Berlin, whose practice unfolds across film, photography, and conceptual inquiry. Situated at the intersection of visual art and film, his work approaches the image not as an end point but as a provisional site of thought—an unstable surface through which perception, temporality, and subjectivity are continually rearticulated. Informed by existentialism, Zen, and poststructuralist discourse, Matsudaira treats image-making as a form of philosophical investigation, not to represent reality but to expose its conditions of possibility, foregrounding gaps and indeterminacies that underlie acts of seeing and knowing. Through strategies of reduction, repetition, and interruption, he constructs situations in which meaning remains contingent and open. His commitment to analog processes operates not simply as a material preference but as a conceptual position: film grain, chemical residue, and optical aberration function as indices of time and process while destabilizing the authority of the image. Resisting seamless legibility, these elements insist on opacity and duration, challenging the immediacy often associated with digital production and positioning the image as a site of friction rather than resolution. The darkroom occupies a central role within this conceptual ecology, less a space of production than one of transformation—an epistemic threshold where images emerge through cycles of exposure,...

Artwork