Japan House, for those who don't know it, is a period mansion on Cornwall Terrace overlooking Regents Park – think high ceilings, chandeliers, marble fireplaces, moulded cornices.  In this splendid setting, contemporary works by Hiraku Suzuki have a remote, strangely elevated quality.  His casting series, for instance, makes the surroundings part of the work.  Printed colour images of a variety of objects, apparently historic or cultural artefacts, have been masked with silver spray-paint, leaving a ghost image of the object against its coloured ground.  Whole arrays of these images are grouped around specific features of the room – where two walls meet, or above a fireplace.  Works in graphite have a more organic feel, but again play with light shapes on a dark ground.  His circuit series also appears to reference earlier cultures, with spirals of manufactured hieroglyphs in silver ink on white paper, constructing a kind of vortex of human cultural endeavour.

Hiraku Suzuki: Excavated Reverberations
Daiwa Foundation Japan House, London
21 March to 10 May 2013

Above: Hiraku Suzuki, part of casting, 2011-2013. Spray paint on printed paper. Photo: STF.