Seven years ago, Naotaka Hiro was at the airport in Los Angeles when he received a harrowing text from his wife. “There’s someone underneath the house,” she wrote. “Someone’s coughing.” He abruptly canceled his flight to Japan and rushed home to his panicked spouse. Hiro ventured into the crawlspace beneath his home—and found nobody there at all. Perhaps it was a racoon, he thought to himself. But then he noticed a blanket.

“Someone had been there,” he told me recently, showing no sign that the memory induced any anxiety.

Rather than fleeing in fear, as most might, Hiro stuck around, intrigued by the thought that this claustrophobic crawlspace had acted as someone’s makeshift home. “I was like, Wow, this is so uncomfortable,” Hiro said. “But then, after 30 minutes, I was like, This must be okay. It was moist, quiet, and cold. I heard the sound of the other side: my dogs running around, my wife and son’s voices.” He compared the experience to being underneath the world.

This all provided the fodder for some of his recent paintings, which he produces by suspending his canvas just 13 inches above his body—the exact height of the crawlspace of his LA home. Working alone in his studio, without the help of any assistants, Hiro lies supine and then proceeds to paint astonishing abstractions. Filled with forms variously ...