I was born in Japan and from the age of three to fourteen, I grew up in Tanzania, East Africa. In that period, my world could be separated into three places. The first was the inside of the house, where it was filled with stories of my parents, books, and movies from the west. The second was the outside world of an alternate culture and landscape. The third was the place I was supposedly from Japan. It was a place that mostly existed as a pseudo-fictional place in my head, it would be confirmed to be real by brief visits to the real place once a year.
Our family returned to Japan during my high school years and it was a period where it flipped the three places around. The pseudo fiction becoming the real and the real world becoming memory. The idea of culture and class as relative to location was cemented as a fundamental aspect of the human condition.
For college I came to the U.S, enrolling in Atlanta College of Art, however at orientation it was announced that the school would be merged with SCAD and it essentially set the tone for the rest of the school year. I didn’t think I wanted to pursue the art field and so I dropped out after the first year and returned to Japan. I worked in Japan for about two years of saving money and went on a backpacking trip around different countries. I ended up in Italy on the trip and seeing all the beautiful sculpture just living on the streets reignited my interest in going back into pursuing art.
I went back to school, this time going to the Academy of Art University San Francisco where I did a BFA and MFA in fine art painting.
I currently live in San Francisco living and working as a fine artist.
My works are constructed in a way to echo that fact by using western painting (Richard Diebenkorn, Chuck Close, Edward Hopper, Matisse, Euan Uglow) methods, theories, and Japanese painting (Ito Shinsui, Hashimoto Kansetsu, Tsuchida Bakusen) compositional philosophies. The artwork is neither attempting to fully adhere or reject either, this is done to reflect the experience of continually being exposed to separate but parallel aesthetic tastes due to how and where he grew up. It is impossible for him to measure the difference in his personal preference for either philosophies of picture making.
Hiroshi Sato’s work has been featured in various publications such as Fine Art Connoisseur, Juxtapoz Magazine, Visual Art Source and Art Business News Magazine.