STANDING PINE

STANDING PINE is pleased to present Intolerance, a solo exhibition by Youki Hirakawa, opening on Saturday, 19 September 2026.

Hirakawa creates works that read the information embedded within everyday objects, excavating the histories and political dimensions that emerge from them. In this exhibition, he examines the process by which institutions, values, and ways of life—brought to Japan primarily from the United States after World War II—were accepted and became established within Japanese society, linking this process to his own memories and physical experiences, and framing it as an issue that continues to the present day.

Intolerance / 2025, from which the exhibition takes its title, is constructed from two old milk churns combined to resemble an unexploded bomb. In post-war Japan, powdered skimmed milk supplied as aid, together with the widespread introduction of school lunches centred on bread and milk, brought significant changes to the Japanese diet. Hirakawa examines this Westernisation of food not only in relation to the policies of the Occupation, but also through the lens of biopolitics, considering state-led nutritional management and intervention in the body. From there, his enquiry extends to what he describes as a form of “food colonialism”.

The work was prompted by the discovery, in 2023, of an unexploded bomb near Hirakawa’s home in Nagoya. This incident brought together two memories from his childhood on the Atsumi Peninsula: the unexploded ordnance he had seen there, and the rusted milk churns that remained in cowsheds. Out of this convergence emerged Intolerance / 2025. The term “Intolerance” not only refers to lactose intolerance as a physiological condition but also prompts us to question what we have taken for granted through the changing landscape of our eating habits. Taking the transformation of dietary habits as its point of departure, the work asks what we have come to accept as self-evident.

In Souvenir / 2025, Hirakawa enlarges a postcard depicting a Japanese squat toilet photographed during the Occupation and reorients the image horizontally, transforming the toilet into an image resembling a urinal. Recalling Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the work brings into view the external gaze directed towards Japanese everyday culture at the time, while also drawing attention to forms of life and cultural identity that are gradually disappearing through processes of social transformation. At the same time, it proposes a rereading, from an Asian perspective, of the frameworks through which contemporary art has largely been shaped in the West. The work embodies a critical sensibility that Hirakawa describes as “self-deprecating dark humour”.

For Intended Accidental Ingestion / 2026, Hirakawa ingested the tip of a projectile fired from a 9mm round that he acquired at a flea market. After passing through his body, 69 hours and 44 minutes later, it was incorporated into the work. Confronted with the situation surrounding US military bases in Okinawa, and Japan’s deeply entangled relationship with the US military from the post-war period to the present, Hirakawa attempts to take in—through the physical act of literally “swallowing”—a reality for which no simple answer can be found. Blackened by gastric acid after passing through his body, the projectile is presented together with an upturned piece of US military surplus furniture, a glass tumbler, and a tin ashtray stamped “Made in Occupied Japan”.

Through these works, Intolerance approaches from different angles the ways in which the past remains inseparable from the present, continuing to act upon our everyday lives. We invite you to encounter Youki Hirakawa’s practice, which brings to the surface the histories embedded in ordinary life and the political structures that lie beneath them.

Dates: Saturday, 19 September – Saturday, 17 October 2026
Hours: 12:00–18:00, Tuesday to Saturday
Closed: Sundays, Mondays, and national holidays
Opening Reception: Saturday, 19 September, 17:00–19:00 (the artist in attendance)


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Youki Hirakawa

Born in Nagoya in 1983, Youki Hirakawa moved to Germany in his late twenties to pursue his artistic practice, returning to Japan in 2016 after being caught up in an attempted terrorist attack in Berlin. He is currently based in Gifu Prefecture. In recent years, his practice has increasingly focused on the political dimensions embedded within everyday objects.

His major presentations include invited screenings at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. His work has also been presented a ArtScience Museum, Singapore; Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Israel; Sheffield Museums, UK; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia; Vyatka Art Museum, Russia; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; National Archives of Singapore; Salisbury Cathedral, UK; Durham Cathedral, UK; Pola Museum of Art, Japan; Okazaki Mindscape Museum, Japan; and The National Art Center, Tokyo.

Intolerance / 2025 / Old milk can / 1200mm:300mm

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