Some Thoughts About Kadonaga’s Work
By Josine Ianco-Starrels

    I first encountered Kazuo Kadonaga’s work at Ed Lau’s Space Gallery where other revealing art encounters had enriched my life over the years.There, in the pristine environment of the white room, I saw at first glance massive sections of hand-made paper, bare bamboo canes and sleek segments of bark-less tree trunks… simple, stark and without artifice, yet uncommonly impressive.
    While I was familiar with these as raw materials, I had never seen them presented simply as the elements they were, the heart of their matter.Prior to this, they had appeared as materials acted on by the artist.Wood had always been either roughly hewn, smoothly sanded, skillfully carved, incised, polished or inlaid, shaped by the artist’s or craftsman’s eye, hand and sensibility.This was different.
    The longer I looked at the elements before me, the clearer the artist’s intent became; the essence of the material superseded the maker’s will. This art came about in direct response to nature and its component materials. It was about the material itself - its strength, malleability, sensual surface and the infinite complexity of its structure, as well as the possibilities of transformation it contained, the essence of wood itself.This art caused me to consider the difference in viewpoint from the one I had been educated to assume and therefore expected.
    Having been brought up in Europe in an artist’s home and subsequently having chosen to make contemporary art my life’s focus, I expected art to reflect and reveal the artist’s individuality; it had always been the maker who decided how the material would be transformed into object - utilitarian or aesthetic. Art history also taught me that art objects were affected by the time and place, which provided the context and influenced the style in which the artist worked.Obviously Kadonaga’s work was deeply rooted in another tradition, one I was only superficially familiar with, through reading.So why be surprised? Because, I answered myself, the appearance of the work was conceived in such thoroughly contemporary terms, so minimal, so exquisitely accomplished in the language of Western contemporary sculptural idioms, that it make me forget its traditional underpinnings.
    There were no outward signs pointing to what I thought of as Japanese aesthetic markers: the work looked new, contemporary, and cosmopolitan.It could belong anywhere, in any gallery, in any major cultural metropolis. For its singular quality one had to look beyond the surface to its substance.
    Japanese art had, in its past, a long history of appreciation for and assimilation of aesthetic ideas from its close neighbors China and Korea. Yet those influences were so thoroughly absorbed, digested and adapted, that they were altered to assume an entirely new “Japanese” identity.
    Following the Meiji Restoration in the second half of the 19th Century, Western ideas began seeping into cultural circles in Japan.By the 20th Century, such awareness increased as commerce between East and West became more frequent.Japanese artists traveled abroad; some even settled in Paris and other western European capitals.Adventurous Westerners visited the Orient; books and magazines disseminated information and images from continent to continent.
    Still, in spite of such increasing cultural cross-pollination, isolated enclaves of aesthetic traditions still remained.Prior to World War II, Japan, among other self-sufficient societies, remained largely devoid of outside influences, due partially to geographic location and partially to a tradition of firm resistance to foreign influences.
    After the end of World War II, this partial isolation collapsed; the loss of the war and subsequent American occupation diluted the power of traditional values and increased Japan’s desire to join the international community.The business community, in pursuit of prosperity, expanded both commercial and ideological horizons.As competitiveness replaced isolationism, Japan enjoyed a spectacular rise in economic power due to its industrial and organizational abilities, as well as its excellence in the creative areas.
    Poetry, literature, visual arts and film flourished, as traditional strictures relaxed and freedom of expression allowed artists, writers and filmmakers greater leeway for experimentation. One need only think of Fujita, Noguchi or Kurosawa to realize that the stimulus of ideas flowing between East and West enriched extraordinary talents who produced remarkable works of art.The fact that they had their feet planted in different cultures and nourished by diverse traditions added an extra dimension to their work
    While business practices ran smoothly and successfully between East and west, cultural roots often revealed deep differences in underlying assumptions.Western European Judeo-Christian civilizations were based on pyramidal structure with God at its apex dominating mankind who, in a turn, was given domain over nature and all it contained.This stood in marked contrast to Shinto and Buddhist beliefs - the seminal philosophical ideas of Japanese spiritual life - which are based on the existence of many Deities who affect human destiny and glorify Nature and man’s modest place in it.There is, added to that, the promise of man’s ability to attain higher consciousness through meditation and proper observance of rituals.
    Moreover, in Japanese tradition, the creative impulse was regarded as spiritual, intuitive, solitary and illogical.In the West it was considered to be the result of disciplined, educated and highly trained talent.
    Kadonaga, as an artist, considered himself a member of the international community of artists rather than one separated by geography and cultural constructs.His work quite naturally evolved in a way that fused Asian reverential and contemplative attitudes with Western minimalist aesthetic and conceptual ideas.For the past 100 years modern and contemporary art pursued a veritable infatuation with innovation as proof of creative potency; this just happens to fit Kadonaga’s personality and provide added impetus for his innate inclination toward exploration and an almost scientific bent towards experimentation.
    Through the years he proceeded to focus on natural materials. He literally and figuratively placed a spotlight on wood, paper, and bamboo, silk and most recently, glass.In a serial manner, each element became the topic of his scrutiny; he analyzed their component parts, tested their attributes and examined their intrinsic characteristics, noting their responses to change in environmental factors such as fluctuations in humidity or reaction to forceful impact.Each in turn had its moment under the microscope of his curiosity, driven by an unrelenting desire to discover and reveal their unique qualities.
    In the past decade, Kadonaga has focused on glass - glass as element or material.At first, none of us could even imagine how he would expand on the information we already had about glass or change it in a significant way.The origins of man-made glass have been lost in the passage of time.>In prehistoric times, objects were fashioned from natural glass such as obsidian ? a volcanic substance ? or rock crystal, transparent quartz.Throughout thousands of years, glass was blown or cast; it was found in Egyptian tombs and Roman ruins.In the 10th Century, stained glass adorned churches and cathedrals and to this day, glass and crystal objects are used and prized all over the world. In our own time, glass comes in flat or curved sheets, which shield us from the elements, its transparency and translucency allowing unlimited visibility, light and access to the surrounding landscape.We also think of it as a container for liquids or as an aesthetic object made by artisans for the delectation of the eye.
    As with other materials, the results of Kazuo Kadonaga’s inquiry into and exper imentation with glass are unique and surprising.After three years of becoming familiar with the process of glass making by visiting a glass factory, the artist tried glass casting.What caught his attention was the viscous quality of molten glass, its green color as light refracted through it, its massive, bulbous appearance that belies its intrinsic fragility.It took him ten years of experimentation and research to arrive at what he considered a satisfactory conclusion.Once again he has given us an image which contains all that glass has to offer - one that discloses the nature of the material - simply and powerfully.
    We see these immense mounds of swollen, viscous, thickly layered, once molten, translucent oozing matter now as solidified objects.Rolls upon rolls of billowing matter, like clear lava, descend and drip into forms shaped by gravity, swell engulfing swell, like the distended bellies of sumo wrestlers. Their size alone could be the tips of icebergs whose bloated expanse promises great depths expanding downward to the ocean floor.Sometimes they take on the random forms of frozen confections.
We stand incredulous before these translucent turquoise marvels, in awe of their powerful presence, elemental in material, direct in execution and imposing in scale, knowing only that they loom before us and that once again, the artist has made us see something we have never experienced before.