Accustomed to living between cultures, Japanese-born and UK-based video artist Hiraki Sawa embraces the movement of people and the mutable notion of home as central themes in his work. In his early videos, Sawa mapped animated caravans, flying birds, and miniature men over scenes of his spare London apartment, creating surrealist meditations on the familiar and the foreign, travel and transience, and innocence and isolation.

In Dwelling, a project he completed in 2002 as a grad student, tiny animated planes soberly travel around his apartment, transforming Sawa's bed and kitchen counter into runways for a chaotic and impersonal airport. The video's grainy black-and-white footage and the monotonous roar of jet engines underscore the tense restlessness of living in exile and the melancholy of being out of place in one's own home. Sawa exploits the use of scale in this and other works, such as Migration, from the following year, and 2004's Going Places Sitting Down, which invent playful landscapes where bathtubs hold oceans and sheepskin rugs double as snow-covered fields for a parade of nomadic men and their flock. Since 2004, Sawa's whimsical blend of reality and animation has spawned several solo and group shows in Australia, Europe, Japan, and the US, including the inaugural exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum's Black Box space in 2005–2006.

As Sawa grows as an artist, he, like photographer Eadweard Muybridge before him, continues to be fascinated with deconstructing motion. Ghostly figures head toward unknown destinations in both 2006's Murmuring and 2007's Hidden Tree. Hako — a six-screen video installation commissioned for his 2007 solo show at London's Chisenhale Gallery — takes Sawa's work in a sculptural direction, examining objects that move in place without actually going anywhere, such as Ferris wheels and carousels. By balancing his sense of wonder and adventure with an inventive use of animation and scale, Sawa has discovered a unique world right under his nose.

-Shayla Harris