When people are just setting out as artists, you often hear them asking, ‘How can I find a visual language of my own?’ Troubled by their own talent and tortured by the merciless occupation that is art, budding artists study the history and technology of their craft, go in search of and try out the most far-fetched artistic techniques, scroll social media – I mean ‘look through social media to train their eye’ – resignedly follow colleagues who have already matured as artists, and desperately ask for help from the powers above or, at least, an art consultant. In what way does this not qualify as a spiritual and moral quest? While they are busy looking for form, i.e. for the external and instrumental, their interior processes are dozing, steadily accumulating the natural capacities they need – as yet unexpressed capacities that are their own and have not been appropriated from outside. Evidently, when it comes down to it, learning from other people’s mistakes is not so effective – and not so eye-catching, it should be admitted. Otherwise, the examples of Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and other creators of extremely truthful art that transcends sensory boundaries would be carefully noted and followed. Fortunately, in the art of our time there are a few artists emerging who brim with a clear devotion to their own essence. One such is Haroshi, who has managed to find his true self between an obsession with skateboarding when he was a young man and the Buddhist wood carving he does today.

Haroshi was born in Tokyo in 1978.

His teenage years coincided with a period when Japanese street culture was going through a kind of puberty – a period of acute reactivity, rebelliousness, and new information that mainly came from the West. The increasingly problematic ‘bubble economy’ which came crashing down on Japanese society at the beginning of the 1990s encouraged the formation of alternative micro-communities and subcultures. There were scattered outbreaks of criminality, but there were also relatively harmless associations which took their organizational principles straight from the original source – the American subculture which had emerged in rundown districts of New York in the 1970s. During these years – the most terrible in New York’s history – once respectable neighbourhoods in the Bronx were taken over by brothels, drug dens, and other forms of criminality. Ordinary people struggled to survive and to cope with a chaos which seemed beyond anyone’s ability to control. Urban entertainments such as DJ-ing, breakdancing, graffiti, punk, rap, and skateboarding brought people together into groups with shared values, behavioural models, and methods of communication that were contrary to those accepted in ‘high society’. This opposition to common standards of behaviour was partly to do with the fact that most participants in the street movement belonged to racial and sexual minorities. This street culture took shape mainly on the east coast, but LA and the west shore of the US had their own clusters of street societies. Street culture in the City of Angels was notable for its emphasis on street art, graffiti, and skateboarding – partly because the climate in this area lends itself to problem-free skating on boards and the character of the city’s urban development to graffiti bombing.

The whiff of the rebellious mood of Californian street culture carried all the way to young people in Japan via old American skateboarding magazines and occasional video clips and recordings of the first skateboarding competitions involving the young Tony Hawk. Confronted with stagnation at home, the young generation of Japanese were keen to throw down a challenge to the severe status quo – partly because they saw the country’s problems as a consequence of failure to accept everything new and ‘imported’. Despite the fact that, formally, Japan had emerged from its long period of isolation, Japanese society still retained numerous unwritten rules, curious takes on public order, standards of politeness, and other inflexible social constructs that made functioning in Japanese society no easy task even for the Japanese themselves.

This was the perfect moment for non-formal protest: the popularization of skateboarding coincided with the punk-inspired Ura-Harajuku movement of the 1990s, which likewise had no intention of complying with public morality. As the skateboarding community grew, the number of signs forbidding it in various places grew too. The noisy scraping of asphalt by skateboards sorely threatened the local formal/informal cultural code, so Tokyo’s city administration took refined measures to fight the indefatigable figure skaters. To push these inconvenient rebels out of the enlivened cityscape, the city built skateparks – usually situated far from the bursting city centre. Of course, the ‘oldies’ of the skateboarding industry were hardly happy. In fact, though, for all these attempts to drive skateboarding out through new rules and territorial limitations, the Japanese community that had sprung up around skateboarding culture merely grew stronger, elevated by this aura of marginality and nicheness. Proof of the growing interest in it was the proliferation of shops selling streetwear, flagship boutiques for hypebeast labels, and – the cherry on the cake or, to be more exact, the screw on the deck – skateboarding’s debut as an Olympic sport at the summer Olympics in Tokyo.

From counterculture to mainstream popularity. From customized equipment to the expense involved in taking part in a craft. Like any other hobby, skateboarding obliges its practitioners to possess a special instrument, through trained interaction with which a skill is learned. Obvious? Of course. But what happens with equipment that has already performed the number of tricks allotted to it? When you can no longer ride on a board, where does it go? Long before people started exploiting the ‘green’ agenda in popular art and greenwashing became an abnormally common part of normal life, Haroshi spotted that worn-out skateboards could be material for creating something new. Probably the only case of someone being inspired by seven-layer laminated maple.

Haroshi’s first efforts, however, did not even come close to producing new alchemical discoveries. They were more like the resolution of practical issues by methods that were hardly obvious. For instance, by making a hole in a deck, Haroshi knocked together a shelf to hold flowerpots. The shelf was popular with his household for its functionality, but Haroshi himself was not happy with its execution, which was far from high quality. After five years in jewellery-making classes and several naturally formed piles of skateboarding decks, Haroshi returned to the idea he had previously abandoned – after a kick in the ass from his wife, who had spotted the potential or rather the material gathering dust in a corner of a room and asked him to get rid of it in whatever way he liked or else use it to make anything whatsoever.

To begin with, Haroshi indeed made ‘anything whatsoever’: he wanted to polish the skills he had acquired when working as a sculptor’s apprentice. He called this process ‘carving from worn-out timber’. These were classic student exercises in modelling extremely realistic hands, feet, skulls, faces, and so on. It’s striking that even now these studies in anatomy do not look like mere training exercises. The way they suddenly break off conveys just the right degree of unfinishedness, as if they have been jerked out of an overall corporeal mass. Where the shape is cut around, the sculpture’s insides show through – naked layers of plywood flesh of different colours that have been pressed tight to form the moulded wooden body. These crudely made shins, ankles, and wrists feel ‘made’, artificial, inhumanly solid, and at the same time tensely pulsating and humanly vulnerable. If you look at them for long, you can catch a strange feeling of an excess of fleshiness, as if you are sinking your eyes into an anatomical theatre. In the context of skateboarding, the latter’s tendency to cause bodily injuries, and the desperate antics of its ‘players’, such an interpretation seems terrifyingly apt. Like people, skateboards clash in unequal battle on the ascents and falls of the ramp.

Haroshi’s anatomical pieces were followed by more decorative, but no less realistic figures that repeat the totemic signs of the streets. Taken separately, these images do not convey anything except themselves, but when enumerated together, they form a map of the horcruxes of street culture. Doves (urban chickens by another name), fire hydrants, bottles containing energy drinks or something stronger… Haroshi used the latter as the basis for an imitation of a draped paper bag. Punk skulls, middle fingers raised in insult, and, of course, Dunks.

Sneakers made by Nike, Dunks are a model that was initially popular with basketballers for the support it gives the sole of the foot. Subsequently, they became a must-have among skateboarders. The company’s early advertising strategies flopped, as did its attempts to enter the growing market in skateboarding at the beginning of the 90s. Eventually, however, Nike realized it needed to release a special line dedicated to skateboarding; it called it ‘Nike SB’. Nike SB Dunk sneakers proved a key product in the new subdivision and an opportunity for collaborations. One of the first to be invited to take part was Haroshi, who in 2010 cut out a pair of Dunks from a stack of boards belonging to skateboarders from Nike’s team of pros – P-Rod, Lance Mountain, Eric Koston, Brian Anderson, Cory Kennedy, and others. Haroshi modelled the Dunks on his own pair of well-worn sneakers and concealed in them a number of surprises. The first of these is visible to the naked eye: the curve of the decks exactly corresponds to the curve of the shoe. The second surprise can only be detected using X rays: right under the sole is a deck with the ironic message ‘sole in soul’.

Nike’s example was followed by other companies wanting to exploit the trend for skateboarding and show off their own spirit of rebellion in a corporate setting. Burton Snowboards commissioned Haroshi to do a large batch of snowboards for an event in Tokyo. Another company to join in was streetwear brand HUF, founded by Keith Hufnagel, a cult figure from the skateboarding crowd. In 2012 Haroshi joined HUF and the skateboarding shop DLX in presenting a limited-edition object in the form of a dismantled deck with ‘Hot Zinger’ in bas relief. In 2015, taking part in a project called ‘Live and Let Live’, Haroshi assembled one of his largest sculptures: in the middle of a skatepark in Osaka he erected a three-dimensional mosaic consisting of 800 donated old decks. This was real recycling: the worn-out boards became the basis for a new skateboarding ramp.  Haroshi’s striped wooden constructions with cut outs continued to enchant the street community. Haroshi gradually started getting into talks with galleries; he emerged from them with contracts for collaboration.

This is the moment for us to discuss the attractiveness of craft in the world of big art. In particular, traditional Japanese craftwork.

People apparently never used to have any need of analogue things, the handmade material filling of the environment around about them. This is a controversial view – and hardly the most popular one – in an age when digitalization is so conveniently making our lives even more convenient. But in a situation when almost everything – including objects, processes, and ways of presenting art – is subject to digitization, the need for grounding creative practices that sometimes literally fetter us to the ground for a time is making us look backwards, into the depths of history. Predictions of a trend for maximally physical art that makes us inclined to, or even reveals itself only during, real-life interaction are not without foundation. At least, it is now not difficult to imagine that people will grow tired of demonstration of the invisible, tired of the impossibility of articulating concealed subtexts or of the difficulty of making sense of various post-truths. Well, we shall heal ourselves with – and be content with – craft objects and non-digital images.

Admittedly, this is experience that’s available to us right now if we only look towards Japanese culture. It’s commonplace to think that in Japan every little thing, even the most inconspicuous, will be perfectly made. Haroshi and his way of working with skateboarding boards are yet more proof of this stereotype’s truth. Haroshi does not conceal the process by which a pile of skateboards acquires a coherent form; he makes this process visible, state by stage, in layers. His love for painstaking handiwork is something he evidently acquired in early childhood. Japanese culture is richer than any other in traditional, unique crafts. Japanese crafts are usually categorized in terms of the type of product they produce, but they can also be distinguished by prefecture (region in Japan). Instead of merely being caged in museum display cases, craft objects in Japan also perform entirely practical everyday functions. In such a setting all people, whether they want it or not, have numerous opportunities to come into contact with objects created by the hands of craftsmen – be they ordinary sheets of wasi paper, sikki (lacquered pottery), kago (small baskets), or the less common mikoshi, which are palanquins for divine offerings. With just a few exceptions, production techniques have not changed to this day. On the contrary, because they have been handed down from generation to generation, artisanal skills and high standards have been carefully preserved by Japanese craftsmen.

Haroshi is not from a famous line of craftsmen, but as a child he trained his eye by watching his grandfather, who would make anything and everything. In what sense is this not ‘tradition / having one’s eye in’? In elementary school Haroshi was always doing handicrafts – partly because, as he himself says, his health was on the weak side. He was not all that good at the fundamental subjects, but when it came to the creative assignments pupils were set during the summer, he won all the praise and all the prizes. From popular but hard-to-find figures from the series ‘Sakigake!! Otokojuku’ to customized lightweight Tamiya toy cars, he made everything with his own hands. Seeing his grandson’s passion, his grandfather allowed Haroshi to take lessons at a nearby craft workshop. This was both an entry into the world of art and an exit from it – because it was not long before he had to stop taking these lessons.

A new opportunity arose when, after a decade of constant practice, Haroshi mastered the art of carving anything and everything from stacks of worn-out decks. His skateboard carving is reminiscent of another traditional Japanese craft – inami, wood carving. The city of Nanto, formerly known as Inami, in Toyama prefecture attracted a concentration of skilled carpenters. In the mid-18th century the famous woodcarver Sanshiro Maekawa came to Imami to oversee the restoration of the main hall of the Zuisen-ji Temple. Together with local craftsmen, he made the Chokushi-mon Chrysanthemum Gate and the Lion Pillars at the entrance, now recognized as exemplary masterpieces of inami. The high inami style is noted for its double-sided carving, known as ‘the sukashi-fukabori technique’, for the emphasis it places on the human figure, for distortions of perspective in the creation of reliefs, for chiaroscuro modelling of volumes, and for multi-layered compositions. Since the 1990s Nanto has held the Inami International Camp to give local craftsmen the chance to exchange experience with and train carvers from other countries, thus simultaneously preserving and modernizing their craft.

In essence, Haroshi became a craftsman. Meticulously but not torturously, diligently but rebelliously, he was producing sculptures commissioned by visiting clients, of which there were many. The process of creation became polished routine. First, there is the accumulation and selection of ‘raw’ material – ideally, decks inscribed with many scratches, scuffs, and stickers (a number of skateboard shops have kept Haroshi well supplied with used decks from the very beginning of his journey). The next step is de-processing: Haroshi takes the boards apart, removes their skin, the layers of factory processing, putting to one side the rare sections with foil or striking sidewalls, and forms a so-called ‘deck’ (think deck of cards) from selected colour combinations. Inside the layered trunk he places an object he has created – for example, an iPod inside a sculpture of a pixelated apple or a broken wheel from his own collection of unusable parts. This concealed element testifies to the strong and close connection between the author and his creation: the secret component remains invisible to everyone but Haroshi, who can only see it while he is working on the deck. Just as in ancient days the Buddhist sculptor Unkei inserted a crystal sphere into a projection of the heart of a statue of Buddha, Haroshi endows his sculptures with a soul, leaving in them skateboard parts that move although they do not move themselves.

Learning a craft can be both a gift and a curse. Both an evolving set of tools for true creative expression and shackles that prevent you from jumping into the water to swim freely. When it seemed that all conceivable storylines had already been carved, Haroshi decided to try out in free sculpting, unconstrained by any conditions set by clients, the skills he had so carefully honed.

He makes no preliminary sketches: the strange, whimsical creatures simply emerge from under his hands as he whittles them. It as if their small, moulded bodies are growing out of massive fire hydrants; they stand firmly on the surface and seem seamlessly connected with surrounding space. About the height of a skateboard truck, the tiny idols are carved from the same monolithic block of decks as Haroshi's early sculptures. But they do not have the striped pattern running along the entire length of their forms. Bulges of different colours are placed unevenly in their body parts, as if blistering out of the block of wood of their own will, in all their imperfection. The material is shaped by creator and created simultaneously; both are cooperatively involved in the process, giving each other a sense of control. In just the same way, the busshi, i.e. Buddhist artists who specialized in creating painted and sculpted images of the Buddha, believed in the animation of the material from which the sacred face emerged. When carving their statues, they were careful not to injure the Buddha by cutting away too much of the wood. On the other hand, if the form was broken off too early and the image did not have a chance to emerge, they would not be able to greet the Buddha. Finding the desired image is a single process, impossible without the presence of the one who is seeking it and equally impossible without the presence of the one who is being sought. Finding random forms that reveal themselves gradually but are still controlled by the pressure of the fret saw, Haroshi allows the images to come into being and greets them with the name ‘Guzo’.

Guzos cannot be described in terms of anthropomorphic forms, just as they cannot be characterized as something animalistic. They are not animate objects, yet they clearly announce the presence of a soul in them. They are created by earthly human craftsmanship and by an otherworldly, inhuman force that bursts from the block of wood. According to Motoori Torinagi, guzos are incarnations of Shinto deities, or kami: ‘everything that is rare and unusual, that has exceptional qualities and inspires awe; birds, animals, fields, grasses; and everything else are called kami.’ In 2017 Haroshi created what could be called a polytheistic pantheon of deities. In the empty space of a white cube the figures of the creatures are arranged in a hierarchical arc, as if the gallery space were a temple, the exhibition a cult place, and the viewer a participant in a mystical rite of passage. If skateboarding culture had its own religion, guzos would be its godlike figures, totems, guardians, reminders of selflessness, fearlessness, joy, and passion.

The things we need most always come in the most unexpected way. The search for the divine in the everyday brought Haroshi to... a box of old children's toys. After the exhibition with the totemic guzos met with a positive reception, it was necessary for Haroshi to continue working with small sculptures while simultaneously inventing new characters. But new ideas were hard to come by. One day, in the warehouse of his studio, Haroshi found a box of vinyl toys. The box belonged to Haroshi's studio neighbour, Mr. Kondo, a sculptor. The box was brim full of vinyl figures with broken body parts. In the 1960s sofubi, toys made of soft vinyl and based on Japanese TV shows, films, and comics, were extremely popular in Japan. Experiments in finding a tactilely unusual, extra-stretchy, and durable material for toys began in the 1950s. But the general craze for movies about giant kaiju monsters prompted toy manufacturers to get their act together and start mass-producing sofubi of Godzilla and Ultraman. In that same box Haroshi also found figures of Naoto Date, or Tiger Mask, a popular character from the eponymous manga about a bad wrestler who becomes a ‘good guy’. Ironically, this terrifying gangster had lost his face. The time-worn toy reminded Haroshi of the Tiger Mask figure from his childhood, which at the time had marked the beginning of unconscious collecting: after Nato Date from the Chogokin series came a stage when Haroshi was obsessed with Kinnikuman (Muscle Man), Gundam erasers, and toy models of military equipment. Nostalgia combined with the upcoming deadline for a new exhibition inspired Haroshi to start restoring the damaged old sofubi. This idea was a continuation of his recycling theme and saved time on production of new sculptures: in the case of damaged sofubi, only the specific missing fragment needed to be cut out.

Haroshi began using sofubi in a similar way to skateboards. The worse they were, the better. The more scratches on the skateboard, the more spectacular the deck will be. The worse the condition of the sofubi, the more unexpectedly it will coalesce with new body parts. Haroshi does not perceive objects’ flaws as defects, as a reason to get rid of a thing. For him, cracks, chips, or even entire missing fragments are voids that can be filled so that the object’s individual history can continue to be written. A similar philosophy is characteristic of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with urushi lacquer. Instead of avoiding interaction with the breakage or trying to disguise it, kintsugi masters fill the cracks with a special paste, making them visible. Instead of looking for toys in second-hand shops, where every effort is taken to ensure they are in good condition, Haroshi buys sofubi from the1960s and 1970s on the Japanese equivalent of eBay, where people are more likely to give away something that is already broken or simply no longer needed. Of particular interest to Haroshi are vinyl figures with someone’s signature on the sole. After all, when all the kids around you have the same Godzilla toys as you, you naturally want to make sure you don’t lose yours. After Haroshi gives the worthless sofubi new body parts, new characters, personalities, or even several personalities at once that are forced to remain in a state of eternal struggle (as in the figure ‘I versus I’), he leaves his signature in the clear spaces on ​​the soles. These salvaged aliens are a piece of history.

When Jackson Pollock spread drops and threads of paint across the surface of a horizontal canvas in the middle of the last century, one of his contemporaries offered an almost esoteric view of this creative practice. Harold Rosenberg compared Pollock’s painting technique to a ritual process. The term ‘action painting’, coined by Rosenberg, emphasized the key role played by the unconscious impulse and the liberating act-gesture in the process of creating a work of art. The artist is a shaman, who devotes his mind and body unreservedly to the canvas. The photographic documentation left us by Hans Namuth only confirms the performative rhetoric of Pollock's process. The artist does not paint a picture: he moves, brush in hand, in an unconscious dance that is rhythmic and random, resistant and uncontrolled, precise and abstract.

The continuous painting spread across the entire surface of the canvas is a byproduct of semi-detached dripping. Haroshi’s Mosh Pit borrows this sense of movement from Expressionist painting, recreating it with a hypnotic pattern of skateboard decks. Just as Pollock made his own physical being part of the process, Haroshi brings hundreds of people into the frame of the canvas, depicting them through their relation to a skateboard board. Each piece of a board is an individual person, an individual skateboarder whose story can be completed in thought by looking at a piece of his or her equipment. Together, the pieces of boards form a crowd, a mixture, chaos. A multitude of unique faces, stories, colours, patterns, scratches, cracks, broken legs, crumbling bushings – all colliding with one another in the same place, pushing, arguing, trying to outshout each other, just like in a mosh pit in the heart of a concert crowd. Recklessness, competitiveness, and desperation coexist here with a sense of unity and belonging.

Каждая доска будет выполнять разные трюки, но каждая доска будет по итогу изнашиваться. Каждая доска, Every board will perform different tricks, but every board will eventually wear out. Every board used in the ‘Mosh Pit’ series of work is unique but a part of a whole. A whole skateboarding culture that paradoxically combines brutality and solidarity, exclusivity and everyday life, insensitivity to pain and sensitivity to fleeting moments, mosh pit and mono no aware (the pathos of things). Fired up with inspirational courage, we can now come back to the question of how Haroshi has been so successful; the answer we get is hardly sophisticated: