Hiro Yamagata is a contemporary Japanese artist best known for his brightly colored, highly detailed screen prints depicting festival scenes and parades. More recently, the artist has been utilizing lasers and holograms to produce hallucinatory installations that are reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s work. Born on May 30, 1948 in Maihara, Japan, Yamagata worked in an advertising firm in Tokyo before attending the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He is especially famed for attempting to recreate 1,600-year-old Afghan statues of Buddha that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, a $60 million proposal that combined lasers and solar energy. Yamagata has exhibited with Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, GA, and was shown at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and several locations in California. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.