Location: Richmond, CA
Medium: Installation, sculpture, social practice, performance, video
Website: tarohattori.com
Taro Hattori was born in Tokyo, Japan, and moved to the United States in 1995. He holds a BA in Clinical Psychology from Sophia University in Tokyo and an MFA in Time Arts/Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Richmond, California, and serves as Associate Professor and Chair of Sculpture and Individualized/Interdisciplinary Programs at California College of the Arts in Oakland.
Hattori has shown his installations and socially engaged projects nationally and internationally at institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Asian American Arts Centre in New York, and Ssamzie Space in Seoul. He has received grants from the Creative Work Fund, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, the California Arts Council, Art Matters Foundation, and the Zellerbach Foundation, and held residency fellowships at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the de Young Museum, Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Program, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, MacDowell, and Omi International Art Center in New York.
Hattori creates interdisciplinary installations, sculptures, and socially engaged projects that investigate the relationship between discomfort and pleasure, conflict and harmony. Drawing on theories of identity formation through encounter with the other, his work treats both individuals and societies as ongoing compositions of dissonance and consonance. His installations combine carefully crafted physical structures with participatory elements — performance, conversation, and song — creating sensory environments where audiences confront contested social and political questions.
A recurring concern in his practice is the condition of social exclusion: who is included in the body politic and who is rendered invisible. In recent years his projects have taken the form of mobile and relational platforms — a traveling teahouse, bicycle-mounted confessional structures — that bring communities together in shared space and invite storytelling across lines of difference.
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