Kano is an installation artist who creates unpredictable new environments from everyday objects including nature itself. His landscapes therefore lack any defined boundary, allowing us to reconsider our place in an increasingly urban life.
After studying Environmental Design at Tokyo Zokei University, Tetsuro Kano moved to the Fine Arts department, graduating with an M.A. in 2007. His early work often involved him sowing seeds in a gallery or other unusual places and overseeing the growth, but he has since shifted to more large-scale and residency-based installations. Although Tetsuro Kano’s work is never overt, it often seems to revert back to the question of what nature is and our place in it. It is a reminder that nature itself is both uncontrollable, yet it is also the most dependable and constant force we know. Alongside the natural materials, colourful plastics, rubber and other materials are prominent in many of his pieces, but Kano’s work does not suggest kitsch—rather seeming only to reflect the reality of the natural world we live in, especially in Japan where even parks are equipped with prefabricated playgrounds, safety rails, trash cans, and the inevitable litter scattered around.
Naturplan is a series that has become Kano’s signature work. Each site-specific version combines a variety of mismatched objects—reflected in his own descriptions of the medium used, including “readymade”, “bird”, “seed”, “plant”, “fruit”, “sand”, “netting”, and “rope”. The incorporation of live birds, which are set free in the gallery to do whatever they will with the seeds, fruit or other objects, brings a temporality and urgency to the work—not to mention the natural apprehension and curiosity of those who venture inside an art exhibit with a wild animal. And although they occupy the same space as the birds, it draws a line between us, as humans do not have the freedom to alter the installation. However, the most prominent medium from the list is the netting, looming above in complex patterns, seemingly strung at random through the gallery (or even outside in one version) without regard to where the viewer will walk. Like many of Kano’s pieces, Naturplan is ripe with contradictions. It’s frank yet cryptic. It’s playful yet ominous. And due to the natural element, it is unpredictable, yet inevitable.
In Tropical literalism, Temperate pluralism at the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2014 Kano brings the scale of Naturplan back down size in a series of eclectic ready-mades on white gallery pedestals. Several of the arrangements remind us of traditional still-life paintings—the nature morte palpable without the distance of the picture frame as the fruit is literally decomposing in front of our eyes. On other pedestals, lonely bare branches with crudely sawn-off branches stand erect, unadorned save the occasional rope lashing or perching bird. All the works are connected by processed timber, arranged to form a labyrinth with no apparent exit.
Another recent series, Savage Structures, 2013, is an eclectic collection of standalone ready-mades using an even more perplexing combination of natural and manufactured materials. The description “readymade” is particularly apt for Savage Structures, as several have Duchampian shades with surprising, playful and sometimes puzzling arrangements. The sculptures feature the familiar roughly-hewn branches, seeds and fruit of his other work, but there is an emphasis on ceramics and glass—which he created himself through a glass casting technique. By combining found materials with self-produced ones, the sculptures not only question our definition of artificiality, but they evade our ability to judge them in terms of their function, value and any other context that we, as viewers, would otherwise bring to them. Kano’s Savage Structures have thus been repurposed to remove their purpose, allowing them—and the environments they occupy and create—to be continually reinterpreted.
Kano Testuro has been participating in group exhibitions and residencies for the last decade, primarily in Japan and more recently in Indonesia and Romania. His solo exhibitions include a top billing for the Bloomberg Pavilion Project at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and HARA MUSEUM ARC, Gunma.
Text by Ruben van Mansum
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