Yoshitoshi Kanemaki’s Twisted World
Turning heads isn’t the only thing Yoshitoshi Kanemaki’s sculptures do, but the twisted, fused faces of his bizarre oeuvres are his stand out feature.
His metaphorical, contemplative pieces appear to look like anatomical glitches in the bodies of young women, as if movement and time collided into each other.
This sculptor is a Chiba native and graduated from the Department of Sculpture from Tama Art University. He has been an important Japanese artist for the last few years, thanks to his trippy work. Although his art can be unsettling at times, he covers very familiar topics.
The wheel of faces and varying emotions often found in his body of work are a symbol of people’s ever-changing mood and inner indecisiveness; Kanemaki says that “everyone holds hesitations or inconsistencies that they can never answer” and translates this into his art.
He also dwells on the topic of mortality: he creates sculptures depicting human skeletons and faces of grief. However, as dark as it may sound, Kanemaki talks about it with a feeling of acceptance, as it is essential to life and development.
Although he claims to be “very contemporary” as an artist, Kanemaki uses ancient Japanese sculpting techniques and camphor wood, a type of material used for traditional furniture and religious sculptures in Eastern Asia.
Even if Yoshitoshi Kanemaki’s humanizing take on contemporary art appears eccentric, his multifaceted sculptures of girls speak for many people. Merging grins and sad eyes, this is his way of connecting the abnormal to the normal.
About the Author:
Mizuki Khoury
Born in Montreal, based in Tokyo. Sabukaru’s senior writer and works as an artist under Exit Number Five.
