Since 2013, Masaki Hagino has centered his painting practice on the premise that perception is inherently subjective. Under the overarching theme Darstellung der inneren Wirklichkeit — Auseinandersetzung mit subjektiver Wahrnehmung anhand eines mehrdimensionalen Perspektivsystems (Representation of Inner Reality: An Engagement with Subjective Perception Through a Multidimensional Perspective System), he explores how pictorial space is constructed, perceived, and cognitively reconstructed through the interaction between artist and viewer.

Human perception is fundamentally shaped by individual experience, memory, emotion, and physiological differences. Echoing Immanuel Kant's understanding that reality is never encountered as objective truth but always mediated through subjective cognition, Hagino approaches painting as a process of continuous interpretation. Both the artist's construction of an image and the viewer's perception of it are understood as subjective cognitive acts. A painting therefore does not exist as a fixed visual object but is continually reconstructed through the perceptual frameworks of those who encounter it.

Throughout its long history, painting has confronted the challenge of translating a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Hagino compares this process to the principles of information compression and decompression: the artist perceives the world and compresses that experience into the pictorial plane, while the viewer reconstructs it through their own cognitive framework. The work is therefore realized only through this double process of subjective translation, making every encounter with the painting inherently unique.

To materialize this idea, Hagino developed what he calls a multilayered perspective (mehrdimensionales Perspektivsystem). By layering semi-transparent materials such as wax and silicone, he constructs a stratified visual field in which multiple spatial planes overlap and intersect. Conventional distinctions between foreground and background become unstable, producing visual ambiguity, temporal displacement, and cognitive friction that actively engage the viewer's perceptual process.

Where Cubism sought to dismantle the fixed viewpoint by presenting multiple perspectives simultaneously, Hagino instead examines the mechanisms through which perception itself constructs spatial reality, including its inherent ambiguities and limitations. His paintings function not simply as images but as perceptual devices that invite viewers to actively reconstruct the work through their own subjective cognition.

This reciprocal process of compression and decompression, shared between artist and viewer, forms the conceptual foundation of his central series, Es weilt im Inneren (It Dwells Within). The title refers not only to what resides within the individual mind, but also to the internal structure through which painting itself comes into being—through the dynamic relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer.