“Put a Band-Aid on it” said the berating mother when a young aspiring Tony Hawk practiced his backside 360 flip for the hundredth time and came home defeated with a broken skateboard. What’s next?
‘Moose’
Haroshi will surprise any skate fanatic with his studio full of broken skateboards which have been painfully loved but lost to the forces of physics. Broken skateboards are like paint to Haroshi, his art pieces are made of recycled, old and used skateboards and the finished results are Monet-esque while maintaining the street edge of its original material.
‘Apple’
A skate afficionado himself, Haroshi’s rejuvenates lifeless broken pieces and breaths creative new identities for them in a new art form.
NEXT PAGE: SK8BOARD SHARK!
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His vision was expansive and wild like the endless concrete jungle is to a skater, and what he does best is rebuild the broken pieces together in cohesive ways to form man-made multicolored trunks of wood with brand new rings on it.
If one can tell the age of a tree by looking at a cross section, audiences will be able to experience the true anatomy of skate culture by looking at Haroshi’s pieces. From the newly formed blocks of wood that are composed of layering broken pieces of wood together, Haroshi sculpts them into mooseheads, human body parts, will even form large installations of mural pieces.
NEXT PAGE: CLOSE UPS OF ‘MARIO’
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‘Mario’ close ups
NEXT PAGE: IMPLANTING SOUL INTO SCULPTURES
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Inadvertently as most art happens, the new pieces of wood convey a sense of cartographic dimensionality that give the sculptures depth and complicated hues from afar. While making the pieces he buries inside the sculpture a soul (referred to as Unkei in Japanese culture), from an array of displaced segments Haroshi picks a metal component that is trusted to maintain the skaterific honor. This idea is derived from the practice of building Japanese Buddha sculptures where they will place a crystal ball referred to as “Shin Gachi Rin” (new moon circle) in place of the heart of the deity.
NEXT PAGE: SK8 RODY
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‘SK8 Rody’
NEXT PAGE: SK8 BEAR
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The skater spirit is not one most can understand without experiencing the thrill of weightlessness in mid-air ejecting oneself from concrete to gravity defying spatial exploration. Reincarnation and second-lives are hard to prove but one thing is absolute, the spirit of love and soul are immortal.
<img src='http://www.hypebeast.com/image/2010/02/harvest-haroshi-skate-destroy-recap-3.jpg' alt='' width='400' height='266'
