Bunpei Kado - SCAPE

Bunpei Kado has a unique style. It is crucial for an artist to have their own style, distinguishable from anyone else’s. But so many modes of expression have been exhausted by artists around the world over the long history of art, that, although each age is different, it is still difficult for an artist to discover their own distinctive voice. Art must therefore, expand its territory of “Art” to survive and continuously change its form.
So what are the peculiarities of Bunpei Kado’s work? Kado is proficient in metalwork and likes to make use of found objects. He incorporates them to form something that looks as if it has been there for a very long time, but in fact has not. For example, he adapted a tank in his Germination series by cutting and connecting pieces of metal, and the rustic surface with its worn-out paint was of his making. As a result of these processes, a stereotypical ‘tank’ familiar to our notion of such was created. It is not a tank proclaiming the unique manifestation of an artist’s originality. In Kado’s works, objects look natural and appear to have been found just as they now are. A characteristic of Kado’s work is to begin production by creating stereotyped objects using materials at hand. If they were not stereotypical, they could not function as ‘signs’, but would signify something more.
Another peculiarity is his generation of new meaning by combining objects into forms like jigsaws, and creating a divergence between the original function and the new meaning. The Human Nest series, combining houses and cranes, tactfully expresses the instability of our contemporary urban residential environment. It is fascinating how Kado’s work clearly looks interesting as an object as a result of a combination of familiar objects. The oscillation of meaning generated by this method has broadened in scope over the past few years.
Kado participated in the 2013 Art Setouchi. Not merely creating an interesting object, he incorporated meanings derived from the place or region where his work was put. We look forward to his future pieces showing more of this combination of object and space, as well as his combinations of objects. This solo show at the Art Front Gallery will work with three different installations in three gallery spaces. We will be able to see his recent and further development of a spatial expression in Bunpei Kado’s work since Art Setouchi.

Toshio Kondo, Art Front Gallery