The emphatically hard stone is the most essential element in the work of Hiromi Akiyama. In hardly any other material could he demonstrate the achievement around emptiness so passionately and directly. Having grown up in Japan and having escaped the atomic bombing of his hometown in 1945, East Asian thinking with its polarity of opposites of existence left a lasting impression on him. His existentialist, but in essence modest attitude, to which he adhered at least since his time in Paris, seeks the harmonious interpenetration of inside and outside, of matter and spirit, form and formlessness, something and nothing (i.e. the void). In the symbol of the shadow, the two-dimensional disembodiment of (three-dimensional) sculpture, Akiyama also finds the union of rest and movement, space and time. His enthusiasm for large-scale sculpture made the sculptor a welcome participant in countless symposia. The work is characterized not only by its reductionism, but also by the demand on the viewer to understand the designed emptiness as being filled

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