Luke Hardy is n Australian photographic artist who has spent a significant period of his adult life living in various Asian countries. Out of this experience he has built a body of essentially portrait-based work reflecting on Buddhist and Hindu ritual, often involving water and purification. More recent work contemplates altered states and the thin line between the spiritual and the sensual. His subjects tend to be meditative, half-awake, sometimes somnambulistic. Hardy has had a lifelong fascination with Things Japanese, starting from when he was a child absorbing Japanese popular culture on television and in the cinema. This grew into a more serious consideration of Japanese art and literature, although to this day classic Japanese cinema, particularly the work of Ozu, Masaki Kobayashi and Kurosawa, is a favourite point of contact. In recent years, Hardy has had commercially successful solo shows at Stanley Street Gallery in Sydney and also at the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair. His works are held in private collections in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK, Canada, Australia and the USA. Hardy first exhibited work in Japan in 1991 in galleries operated by the UN in Aoyama, Tokyo, alongside award-winning Japanese photographer Masanori Kobayashi. He has been nominated for the Blake Prize [2008] and the Head On Portrait Prize [2006, 2010]. His photographs appear in a number of publications, including Australian Art Review, Photo Review Australia, the Australian Photography and Gallery Compendium and Burma: Art and Archaeology [The British Museum, 2002].