Hirano Yoshiyasu, born in 1980, has been exhibiting his work since around 2008.
His practice is characterized by two ongoing series: an Animal Series and a Text Series.
The Animal Series, developed from his early years through around 2014, includes two distinct approaches: one using bold, thick-tipped pens and strong black accents to create striking compositions, and another employing ballpoint pens to draw evenly measured, ruler-straight lines that form abstracted animal figures.
The Text Series, ongoing since around 2014, features carefully rendered characters extracted from newspapers. While Hirano appears to treat these characters more as visual forms than conveyors of meaning, the specific combinations of letters and words he selects reflect current events and often carry a sense of irony. In this series, he utilizes differences in pen thickness and the natural bleeding of ink to create a distinctive typographic style.
Since 2018, he has resumed drawing animals alongside his text-based works, and the two modes of expression have been shifting back and forth—though it’s not entirely clear why.