Highlights
New Works Presentations
Hiroko Shiina
Assembling Empire
2025
Diptych
Ink, coffee, acrylic and coloured pencil, paper, wooden panel
121 × 182 cm (overall)
91 × 121 cm (each panel)
Assembling Empire presents an expansive imagined city constructed from countless architectural fragments, each rendered with remarkable precision and accumulated into a dense, layered urban landscape. Rather than depicting a specific place, Hiroko Shiina assembles a fictional realm in which memories, cultural references and imagined structures converge into a single continuously expanding environment.
The work's visual richness is inseparable from its technique. Executed with ink, coffee, acrylic and coloured pencil, the surface is built through the gradual accumulation of lines, textures and tonal variations. Ink provides the intricate architectural drawing that defines the composition, while coffee introduces subtle atmospheric staining and organic shifts in tone. Acrylic passages create areas of contrast and emphasis, and coloured pencil allows for delicate modulation and detail. Together these materials produce a surface that oscillates between precision and instability, order and improvisation.
As a diptych, the work extends horizontally beyond the limits of a single image, reinforcing the impression of a city that continues to grow beyond the frame. Individual buildings retain their distinct identities, yet they become inseparable from the larger structure formed through their aggregation. The resulting composition evokes a process of continual construction in which fragments accumulate into a complex whole.
The architectural density is counterbalanced by expansive areas of dark space above the city, creating a sense of psychological as well as spatial depth. Rather than functioning as a conventional cityscape, Assembling Empire can be understood as an inner architecture: a landscape assembled from observation, imagination and memory, where meticulous drawing becomes a means of transforming countless impressions into a coherent yet perpetually unfinished world.
Shiina describes the work as follows:
"Everything perceived through the five senses, forms, cultures, styles, as well as unnamed events and phenomena, converges into a single vast current, pressing inward and mingling within me like drifting fog at the bottom of the night. From this process emerges an imagined empire that expands endlessly, blurring its boundaries like a living creature breathing in silence. At the center of this realm, until the day I live and die, I continue weaving together consciousness and the unconscious, patiently building a distorted and fragile castle of sand, like the sole guardian left behind to protect a lonely kingdom that no one else may enter."
