Staging Fire and Constellations is the first monograph devoted to the entire career (2002-2024) of the Anglo-Japanese artist Christian Hidaka (b. 1977).
The book presents a wide selection of his work with text by art historian Peter Read, who presents the different stages in the artist’s career and provides keys to understanding his symbolic work. Hidaka’s enigmatic work, full of reminiscences, goes through the history of painting to offer a reading that is both reflexive and sensitive. Combining different pictorial references, the English artist succeeds in linking several aesthetics that seem to oppose each other. His artworks evoke Renaissance painting, characterised by Euclidean geometry, as well as traditional Sino-Japanese pictorial aesthetics, favouring a flat representation of landscapes and perspective.
Hidaka’s work extends the field of figurative representation by incorporating a wide network of symbols as well as temporal and spatial references that embrace the history of Western and Eastern painting.
Editions BA42, 264pp, 20cm x 28cm, illustrated hardback, 2026,
