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(Catalogue Essay)
Jun Kaneko
Gallery of Contemporary Art
Lewis & Clark College
The Dutch Series--
Between Light and Shadow
September 16 to October 31, 1998
Portland, Oregon
Director's Statement
Born in 1942 in Nagoya, Japan, Jun Kaneko began his artistic career as a painter, then became a sculptor upon his arrival in the United States 35 years ago. He studied under Peter Voulkos in the mid-1960s and later taught at the most prestigious schools of design in the country, Cranbrook Academy of Art and Rhode Island School of Design. His work is found in public collections in Japan, the Netherlands, Finland, the United States, and Canada. Today Jun Kaneko lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska, where he has a ceramics studio and kiln in a four-story converted bakery.
It has been said of Kaneko that his ceramic sculptures mix a reverence for tradition with a keen pursuit of the revolutionary. Indeed, Kaneko is known for his monumental dangos (the term is derived from the Japanese word for "dumpling"), huge ceramic forms that are almost monolithic in their presence. These Kaneko builds by hand in the time-honored manner of a hand potter building the walls of a pot.
In working on the dango series for over a decade, Kaneko has perfected the technique of creating objects that sometimes tower at 11 feet high - an astonishing feat considering the multitude of problems in firing such a large amount of clay. It is, indeed, a tremendous engineering challenge to take up to a thousand pounds of clay and mold it into a dango; Kaneko is the first sculptor in modern history to attempt clay pieces of such size.
First, Kaneko's assistants cut the clay into slabs and work out the bubbles by hand. Kaneko then starts with about 600 pounds of clay, working on the base of his sculpture, slowly building up the sides before he encloses them. He works on six to ten dangos at a time, for each work must dry for several weeks before it is strong enough to support the superstructure. Kaneko completes the modeling, building the clay walls higher and higher, taking care that the clay is not too thick or too thin, not to wet or too dry, too soft or too hard. Once built, the dangos must dry for four months, then withstand ten days of firing. It's no wonder that of every ten works, only two or three survive.
As fascinating as this technology is, he cautions that his work is not about the craftsmanship necessary to achieve such powerful objects. "Technique comes after thought," Kaneko says, suggesting that his technical bravura evolves out of his need to express certain concepts. In fact, he says that his basic concepts stay with him for a long time and that the concepts themselves come out of the physical act of making pieces. He is extraordinarily prolific, creating between 300 and 500 works a year. As an object is finished, he visually evaluates his product, then carries over many of the same ideas into his next body of work, emphasizing certain aspects to strengthen an idea as it is manifested in the clay. Speaking poetically, Kaneko likens this creative evolution to the aging process, indicating that his oeuvre continues to develop and mature over time.
The dangos reveal Kaneko's obsession with scale. He writes, "In making any object, we cannot escape the problems of scale, I believe that each form has one right scale. Whether I'm making a large or small object, in the end I hope it will make sense to have that particular scale and form together and that it will give off enough visual energy to shake the air around it." Thus, considering Kaneko's exploration of scale and its appropriateness to a form, it is not surprising that other sculptural forms join the monumental dangos in Kaneko's oeuvre. The works shown at the Lewis & Clark Gallery of Contemporary Art include smaller, pedestal-size sculptures as well as wall slabs.
It is in the, wall slabs, especially, that Kaneko's early years as a painter assert themselves, for his sculptures - floor-based, pedestal-size, or wall-hung are modeled and glazed with a painter's touch. Kaneko uses as his "canvas" the hand-formed surface of the clay, which, in itself, reveals the beautiful, rippling texture of finger- and thumbprints. When he glazes the works, Kaneko uses brilliant hues to create strikingly graphic patterns on the clay surface: plaids, stripes, circles and dots, X's and O's, indigo-colored streaks that remind one of sumi ink paintings. Even the dangos, many of them solid in color, evoke a painterly feel, as the light raking across the surface picks up the modulations of the clay.
The works shown at the Lewis & Clark Gallery of Contemporary Art were produced by Jun Kaneko in 1995 and 1996 while the artist was in the Netherlands at the European Ceramics Work Centre. Kaneko made two visits to the Netherlands, working there for a total of five months. While there, he explored low-fire glazes, which resulted in the intensely saturated colors of the Dutch Series, a departure from his earlier color schemes.
All works in the exhibition come from the artist's private collection.
Linda Brady Tesner
Director
Gallery of Contemporary Art
Lewis & Clark College
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