TEPPEI KANEUJI
Born in Kyoto, Japan in 1978. Kaneuji graduated from the master’s course in Sculpture from the Graduate School of Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2003. In 2001, while still a student at Kyoto City University of Arts, he participated in an exchange program at the Royal College of Art (London) and studied sculpture. While focusing mainly on sculpture, Kaneuji’s artistic expressions extend widely to include collage, video, drawing, installation, and set design. His series are clearly categorized according to the type of materials used, or the concepts involved. One constant is how he nullifies the characteristics of the things that serve as motifs and transforms them into unfamiliar forms, by covering existing objects such as driftwood or plastic containers and daily necessities with white fluids including resin, plaster, and powder, or, in two-dimensional media such as collages of photographs and printed matter or drawings, by cutting out images of liquids, divorcing them from meaning, and connecting the resulting shapes together. Kaneuji has held major solo exhibitions at various art museums, including the Ichihara Lakeside Museum (Chiba) in 2022, the Japan Society (New York) in 2021–22, the Ueno Royal Museum (Tokyo) in 2017, the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (Kagawa) in 2016, UCCA (Beijing) in 2013, the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in 2010, and the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2009. He has also participated in many important exhibitions both in Japan and overseas, such as a theatrical solo exhibition “Eraser Forest,” in collaboration with chelfitsch (Toshiki Okada) in 2020, “Japanorama” (Centre Pompidou) in 2017, the Singapore Biennale (National Museum of Singapore) in 2011, “MOT annual 2008” (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), and “All About Laughter” (Mori Art Museum) in 2007. Works by the artist are held in the collections of institutions such as the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Yokohama Museum of Art, Takamatsu Art Museum, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art. Kaneuji is an associate professor of sculpture in the Department of Fine Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts, his alma mater.
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Title: POOOPOPOO #20
Year: 2023
Medium: mixed media
Dimensions: 120 x 120 x 5 cm (47 1/4 x 47 1/4 x 2 in.) -
Title: White Discharge (Built-up Objects) #48
Year: 2019
Medium: plastic, wood, steel, rubber found objects, pigment, resin
Dimensions: 152 x 113 x 41 cm (59 7/8 x 44 1/2 x 16 1/8 in.) -
Title: POOOPOPOO#5
Year: 2022
Medium: mixed media
Dimensions: 80 x 120 x 2.5 cm (31 1/2 x 47 1/4 x 1 in.)
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POOOPOPOO #20
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Year: 2023The “POOOPOPOO” series is a pictorial development from the sculptor Teppei Kaneuji. The appearance of a collage-like layer structure is further enhanced by a special printing technique that reproduces a three-dimensional material. In this work, many layers of particularly strong stripes are superimposed on top of each other. In his previous examples of similarly two-dimensional work, Kaneuji has mainly used an approach closer to collage in which it was relatively easy to recognize the source material, but this piece could be described as a complete turnaround by experimenting with total abstract expression. However, the fact that this is a work of abstract expression does not conflict with its collage-like nature, and one can read borrowings from and references to many artists from movements including Minimal Art and Op Art. The gently undulating blue stripes, for instance, bring to mind Vasarely’s “Zebra.” The combination of vertical stripes in orange, black, light blue, and pink, emphasizing the strong verticality across the entire canvas, emulates a characteristic of some of Bridget Riley’s works from the early 70s, even down to the gently twisting gradations at the top and bottom. Looking at the horizontal axis of the work, the series of equally spaced white parallel lines floating at the center is reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s art. In this work, Kaneuji has created a collage of the “essence” of abstract expression. The layers of the image have completely different textures, with varying image resolution, distortion at the edges caused by the reduction of quality inherent to the JPEG format, blurring caused by image enlargement, and data glitches. This leads to significant differences between the physical height of each layer from the underlying surface, and the perceived depth of what is understood visually as the foreground and background. In addition, Kaneuji has also used a highly specialized printing method to create a sense of faux three-dimensional materiality in this work, making it even more difficult to escape from the visual trickery.
Medium: mixed media
Dimensions: 120 x 120 x 5 cm (47 1/4 x 47 1/4 x 2 in.)
Acquired from Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2023
Past Exhibitions
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- 2023 Art Collaboration Kyoto
https://a-c-k.jp/
- 2023 Art Collaboration Kyoto
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White Discharge (Built-up Objects) #48
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Year: 2019“White Discharge” is one major series that Kaneuji has been working on since the beginning. He stacks various objects in a pile and pours white resin over them. In this piece, he gathers random things like figurines, pipes, containers, and daily goods in a heap atop chair legs, creating a fortress or tower. Although Kaneuji is a sculptor, he does not carve materials like stone and wood. Instead, he presents constructions, which convert ready-made goods such as everyday items, industrial products, and toys as sculpture. As the components are ready-made objects, each of them has specific functions, usages, and meanings, and those attributes would have given them their inherent significance. In the piece, however, Kaneuji intentionally ignores those existing attributes and connects things that would not usually be positioned next to one another. Moreover, the white liquid covers up their shapes. Just as heavy snow covers streets, bridges, and houses in pure white, blurring their outlines and boundaries, in Kaneuji’s “White Discharge,” inherent meanings and images are nullified in the white. Etymologically, “discharge” means the release (dis-) of something that was full (charge). The attributes that had saturated the aggregate of unidentifiable objects constructed by Kaneuji pour out as an oozing white fluid. While everything is mixed together, there are a few objects in their original state, peeping toward the viewer from the occasional gap. When things that go unnoticed in daily life, or are abandoned without recognition, they shine all the brighter just before when they are about to perish.
Medium: plastic, wood, steel, rubber found objects, pigment, resin
Dimensions: 152 x 113 x 41 cm (59 7/8 x 44 1/2 x 16 1/8 in.)
Acquired from Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2023
Past Exhibitions
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- 2023 Art Collaboration Kyoto
https://a-c-k.jp/
- 2023 Art Collaboration Kyoto
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POOOPOPOO#5
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Year: 2022This work was created using image printing technology in 3D. Although it has a definite sense of materiality as if painted with a brush, the surface has a more sculptural than painterly quality, looking like it is structurally piling thin and textured layers atop one another. Kaneuji has always used a diverse range of media (materials), but the creation of this piece involved a kind of double and triple substitution of media—print that has a collage appearance, and protuberances in the processed ink that resemble oil painting. The titles of this series look like binary codes of Ps and Os and refer to the materials and frameworks used by the artist up to this point, and which were employed in the creation of this work: painting, object, oil, photo, and print. If one takes another look at the composition, what catches the eye are the thick orange, silver, and blue lines of spray paint visible on the surface layer, and the extremely magnified purple distortions that spread like a stain on the areas of the base layer. In the layer between those two, fluorescent color surfaces and brushstrokes overlap, and motifs such as watering hoses and tubes abruptly appear together with a concrete spatiality. Each layer has a different degree of resolution and textural quality, which gives rise to an instability where the layers repel one another and never perfectly blend. This realm of ambiguity, complexity, and instability is common to Kaneuji’s work. It is as if the liquid is slowly soaking into and encroaching upon that realm, and fantasy and fiction blur together. This approach runs through all his work, whether in 2D or 3D.
Medium: mixed media
Dimensions: 80 x 120 x 2.5 cm (31 1/2 x 47 1/4 x 1 in.)
Acquired from Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2023