The Renaissance and in particular Giorgio Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" (1550) played a key role in elevating the lowly artist — formerly regarded as a mere craftsman — into something far grander and godlike. Nowadays some art collectors seem to want the opposite, favoring artists who create their art the same way that bees create hives, termites build mounds and spiders produce webs — namely by a chain of small, cumulative acts, driven by instinct rather than vision. This seems to be the way that Kaoru Hirano creates her artworks.
Her artistic modus operandi is to meticulously pick apart the stitching of various garments in a laborious and time-consuming manner, and then to re-tie the threads to create odd, web-like creations. These have a delicate, ephemeral quality, as though they might disappear with the morning dew.
Following a solo exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery in 2007 and a group exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2008, the 37-year-old artist, who is originally from Nagasaki, attracted enough attention in the art world to facilitate her move in 2009 to Berlin, where she now lives and works.