When I try to explain about the artist Kazuo Kadonaga, what should I say
about what it is that he creates? His work presents the materials
purely, almost as if they were unprocessed, as a slice or mass of wood,
paper, bamboo, silk or glass. Compared to sculptors and painters who use
their hands and tools, such as chisels and brushes, I hardly feel any trace
of Kadonaga’s hands in his work. I should perhaps say that his work is
silent. However, when I encounter his work in person, I get a sensation
like, “What on earth is this?” from the overwhelming sense of presence
in his work.
Kadonaga’s interest in his work is not leaving any trace of thoughts or
feelings.It is to discover the plasticity or nature of variability inherent in the
basic, simple materials with which everyone is familiar and to make it
visible through the power of the materials themselves; for example, as
in the way concentric circles are drawn on a surface of water by a thrown
stone, wind ripples are drawn on the surface of the desert by wind, or
molten iron flows from heat.Therefore, the meaning of creation for Kadonaga is to establish a system
for “visualization” suited to a specific material and to execute it to
perfection.
In the process of executing the system, Kadonaga doesn’t care at all to put his hands in the work;
instead, he chooses the very best method, whether through the use of machinery or another person’s hands. It seems
that Kadonaga avoids using his hands because he considers that his feelings may affect the “power of the material itself”
to its completion. Glass material to be melted is put into a furnace, and
like a stream of water from a faucet, the molten glass continues to drip
onto one point in the heated annealing oven.Glass material keeps piling onto itself, and under its own weight creates
an uneven and swelling cone-like shape.After forty hours, it becomes a mass weighing approximately 600 kg. During
the process, there are no human hands applied, and it seems as if the artwork
is created and completed automatically. Kadonaga first started working
on this “Glass” series in 1986 and spent nearly fifteen years before
exhibiting it in 1999.After searching for
satisfactory equipment to create the work, in 1996 he built a large-scale
furnace in Hakusan City, Ishikawa Prefecture. It was an outstanding process and
effort for him to reach the point where he established the system of using a
single thread of glass, and on the top of that, he exhibited no works during
this time period, concentrating only on working with the glass.Once Kadonaga sets a system in motion, he continues to strive for perfection
through careful preparation and continuous experimentation.
The forty hours that it takes to create the mass of a glass piece just
hangs on the edge of the fifteen years that the artist spent on conception
and experimentation. Similarly, I assume that all of his series, wood,
bamboo, paper, silk, and glass, that have been exhibited over the forty
years of his artistic career followed the same path: a long time for conception
and experimentation, with nothing simply created on a whim. While the art
world these days develops constantly, this artist keeps his original stance,
and this seems to be relevant to his artwork
Kadonaga studied neither at an art university nor with any specific artists. I find it difficult to relate
his work to any of the trends or groups of modern art in Japan. Since the beginning of his twenties when he began to
aspire to a career in art, he has been mostly self-taught while learning from his interactions with contemporary artists.
I must say that he is an extremely special kind of artist who stands apart from others.Since Kadonaga first had his solo exhibition in Tokyo in 1971, he has
exhibited mainly the “Wood” series in solo and group exhibitions.
In this series, he used various methods to
make slices in pieces of wood cut from mountain trees.Later in the 1970’s, he started to show his works on the foreign art
scene with some suggestions from a Japanese artist based in Europe. In
1979, he exhibited in the mid-sized city of Malmo, Sweden, and since then he has been active exhibiting mainly on the
American west coast while traveling back and forth from Japan. Kadonaga
distanced himself from the lively art scene in Japan through the 80s and
90s, placing himself in a different system in Europe and the United States
where he can barely speak the languages.In this manner,I consider that he was allowed
to maintain his unique stance without being swayed by the
criticism or tendencies of a smaller arena.
Kadonaga set up a studio for working with glass in Hakusan City, Ishikawa Prefecture in 1996, which
seems to have given him an opportunity to show his work in Japan.After a period of twenty years of not showing in Japan, he exhibited at
The International Contemporary Art Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
Toyama, in 1999, with a solo exhibition in Tokyo the following year.He has had traveling exhibitions showing the
“Glass” series and other works from San Diego to Seattle, and it has been six
years until this current “Silk” project.I cannot call these six years silence, though, when I consider how the
system has been thought out and given to a single material, and how much time
has elapsed for this opportunity to occur.
This is not the first time that Kadonaga has worked with silk.He first
exhibited a “Silk” series in the mid 1980s in the United States where cocoons
were stored in innumerable grids.Rather than showing his recent work “Glass” or working with a new
material, he chose to exhibit “Silk” for the current exhibition and it was
neither to repeat nor reproduce the series but to see through to completion the
entire cycle of the system that he had set up for “Silk” that was previously
unfinished.
“Silk” is definitely different from Glass or Wood, because a living thing, the silkworm, is involved in
the production. Dried pupae that never emerged still remained in the cocoons in the work from
the 80s.Due to the space restrictions of museums and
galleries, Kadonaga had to stop the process with a heat treatment and was not able to proceed with
the process of having pupae emerge.However, the Nizayama Forest Art Museum, with turbines and conducting
tubes visible in the space, had the generous space that other museums couldn’t
offer. Kadonaga decided to re-start the system that he set up for “Silk” in the
power plant, which is a challenging space for the artist, yet the only one in
which he considered that he could achieve the project.
In the beginning of October, a white net was stretched onto a large aluminum frame 8
meters long, and 50,000 silkworms were set loose on the innumerable grids. After a week, I
found the huge frame completely covered in shining white, with an overwhelming
sense of presence. And then, when I got close by and observed it in detail,
I was fascinated by the delicacy of the strings and noticed that the white
was composed of 50,000 cocoons and thin strings. Then when I stepped back
and looked it at as whole, I was stunned to think how much time it took
for it to be created, not by human hands, but by 50,000 silkworms, each
less than 10 cm in length.
Transient strings of cocoons fill a space. Traces of dripping glass create mass.
Innumerable thin slices of wood create the form of the original log. The accumulation of delicacy
in Kadonaga’s work is a trace of the time required to create such massive forms.There is a considerable gap between the
delicacy of the detail and the overwhelming dynamism of the physical mass of
the materials used.Perhaps that is what creates the sensation of “What on earth is this?” to viewers
who stand in front of his work.
I can hardly imagine how “Silk” will have evolved by the time this essay is published. Kadonaga
may have already started thinking of a new material and a suitable system for it while observing the process of
transformation.Let us assume that Kadonaga has carefully organized a system for a different
material. One can safely assume that this material, too, will then reveal
its intrinsic inner form, as far as it exists in its given time and space.