After having completed his classical studies and attended a design school in Japan, at the age of 26 years old, in 1966 Nagasawa leaves Japan and travels across Asia and Europe. Once he arrives to Bangkok via sea, he continues by bicycle through India, Pakistan, Malaysia, until he reaches Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and arrives to Turkey. He then traverses Greece and arrives to Italy: Naples, Rome, Florence, Genoa and Milan, where he establishes himself in 1967, to be exact in Sesto San Giovanni, in a community of artists, and getting close to a coetaneous in particular, Luciano Fabro, already extremely close to the poverist area. Also, having already done a series of works, specially designs, and a series of actions, the work of Nagasawa finds its first occasion of becoming visible at the Festival of Anfo, one the Lake of Idro, near Brescia, with an art work dated 1968.

The poetic theme of the art piece is all into transparency: the artist works on emptiness, conjugating Eastern and Western worlds. In 1971 an art work is born, The Gold of Ofir, that poses into perfect equilibrium everyday simplicity and visionary ideality. And in 1973 we have the first occurrence of the boat theme, that will occupy the artist for all of the Eighties. The Pirogue is an habitation and a sculpted architecture. The union with Fabro produces in 1975 a text made of several entries, on the magazine Data by Tommaso Trini, text that is fundamental to understand the poetics of the artists, and an exhibition, Mediterraneo, in Messina, with Trotta and Tonello. The following year will be the time of Aptico, the sense of sculpture, exhibition curated by Jole de Sanna, in Verbania- Pallanza, with Fabro and Trotta.

The Eighties see Nagasawa present at the exhibition of Flaminio Gualdoni, The sovereign outdatedness, at the PAC of Milan in 1982, that intends to position the sculpture at the centre of the artistic debate; he also orders many personal exhibitions, in particular at the Cavellini Gallery of Milan, with the important exhibition Place of the Flowers; and is invited to Sonsbeek in 1986, the international exhibition of sculpture in Arnhem, where he proposes an ultimate version of the boat theme.

The Nineties see Nagasawa busy on a new crucial theme, that of the fountain, that will bring him around the world, and very often will see him go back to Japan, on the trace of important public and private commissions. Last exhibition in Italy: Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Guevara Tower, Ischia (Na), July 2007. The work of Nagasawa belongs to the new phase of Restitution of the art system, that establishes itself in Italy after 1950. The index of his works proposes with clear evidence an entire cycle or civility of artistic work, that reproduces itself inside him, from the articulation of the simple action to the execution of monumental bronzes. It’s human and natural to ask oneself and ask others: “Why so much?”, why a constructive opening so vast that it covers centuries of experience and modifications? The acceleration of growth depends from the historical placing of the artist in respect to modern art that stays like a chapter behind him.

For Nagasawa and for the artists with whom he dialogues with, making art consists in giving an asset and an essential background to grant a constructive horizon in art. To give back to art an harmonic and global role and the ambition that animates the achievement; this takes place for a necessary contraposition to the model of rarefaction and of loss of depth of the art concept itself that persists undisturbed into the international expositive circuit. Nagasawa’s art orients itself in respect to two poles: East and West. I don’t know exactly how, but one has to win the mental and physical habit and see art in current attitude, therefore Western to value the almost unconceivable effort of a man that pronounces at the same time two propositions that elide themselves: two enemy metaphysics, not to be and be, stillness and doing find a possibility of coexistence in each of his art works. Each is a double work that spreads itself towards east and towards west, you can read all of it in both directions and it is reason of an ideating and executing complexity always clearly visible.

The executive elaboration exists in Nagasawa’s second activity; at the back of this there is a cycle of works performed under the form of “actions” the sense of these is localized in his personal concentration. The first “actions” have started at the beginning of 1968 with the arrival in Italy. The arrival in Italy is the result of the most important of the “actions”, the journey by foot and by bicycle from Japan to Italy that lasted a year and a half (1966-67). The action is a proof of will and character (Nagasawa is a teacher of martial arts) and at the same time he celebrates the physical conjunction of the two opposite extremities through himself.