“Clay, like all other materials, has its own set of boundaries. Beyond that, it is the most accessible human-like material; it responds immediately when you touch it”
A living classroom, Jun Kaneko’s site-specific installations such as The Garden Of Resonance (Portland, USA) are a natural vehicle through which to explore immersive Japanese art and design. These exhibitions often showcase ceramic and print works resembling pre-historic monoliths onto which Kaneko paints elaborate, colourful, and abstract patterns.
With a life as layered as his work, he invites you to consider the concept of Ma ( 間 ), an awareness of space. Ma communicates a sense of place in respect to one’s relationship with the whole; making the space around and between things, the silent pauses in speech, or the negative space in a composition, both impactful and meaningful. Lines are ever-present in Kaneko’s work. Individually, each tile is an abstract work of art, but in combination they take on the role of a macrocosmic seance that transcends its parts.
Figuring The Surfaces
Born in Japan in the throes of the Second World War, Kaneko grew up with a rebellious streak that turned him away from the conformity necessary for success in early academia, but sparked an interest in his mother’s pastime of painting. Displaying an aptitude for drawing while still in his teens, Kaneko bargained with his parents for daytime lessons with the contemporary painter Satoshi Ogawa in exchange for his diligent completion of high school via evening classes. Ogawa, who recognised Kaneko’s talent, saw an opportunity for the burgeoning artist to further develop himself by studying abroad.
Drawing on his acquaintance with American ceramics professor Jerry Rothman, who had completed a project in Japan in the 1950s, Ogawa arranged for Kaneko to travel to Los Angeles, California, in 1963. Although this was the time and place of the so-called West-Coast revolution in clay, it would require serendipity to divert him away from the painted path and into a career that wed his aptitude for expression in two dimensions, to a new interest in three-dimensional form; Immediately after meeting Kaneko at the airport, Rothman deposited him at the home of mathematics professor Fred Marer and his wife Mary, both enthusiasts of contemporary ceramics.
Three weeks spent as a house-sitter among extraordinary works by such avant-garde California ceramicists as Rothman, Paul Soldner, Peter Voulkos, Ken Price, Michael Frimkess, and Henry Takemoto was sufficient to enamour Kaneko with objects in clay, and inspire him to take up the medium in his own work full-time. In 1966, Marer introduced Kaneko to Voulkos, who accepted him as an assistant in his studio at the University of California, Berkeley. Incited more by the general fire of Voulkos’ creativity than by its specific manifestation in Abstract Expressionism, Kaneko produced some vaguely anthropomorphic sculptures painted with broad swatches of thin and dripping glaze, but soon began to exhibit the rudiments of his own style in quieter monumental forms embellished with areas of opaque colour and vivid patterns.
The Surface Figures
Kaneko’s vision, concentrated on simple masses and well-defined areas of un-modulated colour, was reified in a series of sculptures begun in the early 70s while he was serving as a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design. Known variously as Chunks, Stones, or Potatoes, these relatively small and aesthetically terse solid ceramic objects were glazed in bright colours and bold patterns.
In this phase of his career Kaneko was still coming to terms with simplicity, recognising that the same range of expression that encompassed agitation equally embraced serenity, and that any fraction of this range was open to the artist’s exploitation as a means of touching something fundamentally human in the viewer. The uncomplicated givenness of the resulting sculptures, which stood only at a slight remove from the shape and size of wedged clay, proved a perfect pendant to the quiescent mind.
After accepting a position as artist-in-residence at the Cranbrook Academy of art in 1979, he embarked on the project of setting his sculptures free from the pedestal and providing them with the size to hold their own in the infinitely more complicated space of the world at large. The result was the first of the Dangos, rounded like the earlier Potatoes, but asserting a more obvious material presence. Their name, however, gave implicit assurance that, regardless of the physical heights that they might reach, their benign nature would not alter. A Dango, after all, is a ball-shaped Japanese pastry of sweetened rice flour – often coloured with cheerful hues of red bean paste and green tea.
Like the motifs of Willem de Kooning’s Woman series or Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic, the Dango is a primal form to be explored through variation of detail, rather than metamorphosis. Consequently, proportions have fluctuated, with shoulders sometimes parallel to bases in lozenge-like symmetry and sometimes broadening to form wedges, but the feeling of the Dango – the impression it conveys as a touchstone for something intuited but ineffable, has remained constant. Its bulk, which might have moved the viewer to apprehension – especially in the case of examples more than 11 feet in height – has always constituted its primary link to the corporeal and the instinctive.
The shape of each piece suggests its own particular decoration; “When I can hear what a form has to say,” Kaneko states; “I start seeing marks and colours on the surface.” These optical effects create rhythmic movements and give the illusion of depth and space, celebrating universal aesthetic prisms and principles. Whether linear or planar, its movements are its ties to the cerebral and the rational. In the unity of physical form and surface pattern, the Dango is like a Pyrenean boulder incised with ancient petroglyphs: a harmony of the eternal and the ephemeral, of geological epochs and biological lifetimes, of the persistence of inanimate matter and the fleeting, nebulous nature of the living.
The Figure Surfaces
The figure in a more literal sense surfaced unexpectedly in Kaneko’s work – as a logical scion of his investigations of matter and energy in 1993, creating the first of a series of gigantic paired Heads. Given the scale of these sculptures – like that of the marble portrait of Constantine on the Capitoline Hill or the heads of the Great Buddhas at Nara and Kamakura – comparison with the Dangos is inevitable. Like the Dangos, the Heads seem enveloped by an invisible field, not emptiness but rather the strange, immaterial fullness of the void. In a state of supreme serenity, they face one another in suggestion of a mute conversation that holds them, as if bound by gravitational attraction, to a symmetry of form and presence.
In an apparent antithesis of the timeless, detached, and profoundly cerebral nature of his Heads, Kaneko went on to introduce a series of figural sculptures based on the Tanuki, the raccoon dog that is both an actual mammal native to Japan and, like the Coyote in Native American folklore, a mythical trickster. Originating in the multitude of ceramic tourist trinkets made and sold at Shigaraki, Kaneko’s rendition of the Tanuki seems a fugitive from Japanese anime, a sprightly embodiment of the contemporary that jolts the universal and eternal gravitas of his earlier work.
Gathered in brightly coloured and boldly patterned packs around public spaces (perhaps most appropriately at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo) the Tanukis seem to express the playful, spontaneous, childlike counterpart of the reserved and disciplined rationality of the mind. That the Dangos harbour both the wellspring of the Tanukis and the origin of the colossal paired Heads somewhere beneath their serene exteriors, speaks for an aesthetic complexity to Kaneko’s art that runs far deeper than relations of surface and form.
