Korehiko Hino

Korehiko Hino was born in 1976 in Wajima City, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. He is also referred to as Hino Korehiko in Japanese and Korean market and gallery materials, reflecting the family-name-first convention common in those contexts; both orderings refer to the same artist. He studied painting at the University of Tsukuba, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1999 and completing the Master Course in Painting there in 2001.

Hino's paintings center on solitary figures, frequently rendered in briefs or partially undressed, with wide, arrested eyes and a stillness that critics and gallery texts have consistently read as an exploration of anxiety and inner psychological states rather than straightforward portraiture. He gathered a string of early prizes in Japan, including the Prize for Excellence at the 6th Biennial Exhibition of Arts in Makurazaki in 1999, the Grand Prize at the 9th Aoki Shigeru Memorial Award Contest in 2000, the Grand Prize at the 20th Izu Art Festival Painting Contest in 2002, and the Tokyo Wonderwall Prize in 2003. His profile rose substantially in 2005, when he won the VOCA Prize at VOCA 2005: The Vision of Contemporary Art, held in Tokyo.

He went on to hold solo museum exhibitions, including Wandering and Questioning at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2010 and Korehiko Hino: What Lies Beneath at The Ueno Royal Museum Gallery in 2011, alongside a series of gallery solo shows at SNOW Contemporary in Tokyo (Scenery as in 2013, Outward in 2018). One profile lists him as a lecturer at Tama Art University. He continues to live and work in Tokyo and remained an active exhibiting artist through mid-2026, with a solo show at SNOW Contemporary in Tokyo (March to May) and a solo show at Geumsan Gallery in Seoul (June to July), both of which had closed by this profile's data date.

Institutional recognition for Hino arrived early and has been consistent. Early prizes from 1999 to 2003 built toward the VOCA Prize in 2005, one of the awards most closely watched for younger Japanese painters, and his subsequent solo museum shows in Shanghai and Tokyo extended that institutional standing. Gallery and museum texts describing his work consistently return to the same reading: controlled, hyperreal surfaces holding unresolved psychological tension in his subjects' stilled poses and fixed gazes, a throughline that runs from his early prize-winning paintings through his most recent exhibitions in Tokyo and Seoul.

Hino's market runs primarily through galleries rather than a deep auction history. SNOW Contemporary in Tokyo and Geumsan Gallery (also transliterated Keumsan Gallery) in Seoul have both presented recent solo exhibitions of his work, in 2024 and again in 2026, and are the clearest evidence of active representation. Public auction data is otherwise sparse. The auction database MutualArt reports a record price of USD 232,468 for the painting Is It a Dream, sold at Christie's Hong Kong in 2007, though the exact sale date is not published and this figure has not been independently confirmed against a primary Christie's lot record. Additional listings for his work appear on secondary-market platforms including SBI Art Auction and Shinwa Auction, without individually confirmed sale prices exceeding the 2007 figure. Because a full auction history could not be verified, no auction record is asserted in this profile's frontmatter.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Hino, and authentication runs through his representing galleries rather than a foundation or estate structure, which is typical for a mid-career living artist. His public auction record is thin and not fully verifiable from primary sources, so collectors should treat any circulating price figures for his work with caution rather than as an established benchmark. The stronger signals of his standing are institutional: the VOCA Prize, a run of solo museum and gallery exhibitions in Japan, China, and South Korea, and a documented presence in Japanese public collections including the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Ishibashi Museum of Art. His representation by SNOW Contemporary and Geumsan Gallery, both of which showed new work earlier in 2026, is the best evidence that his market is still being built rather than already mature.