Los Angeles
Kazuo Kadonaga’s work seduces almost instantly. There’s a palpable glow coming off the waxy surface of wood, the matte sheen of washi paper, the tonal gradations of scorched bamboo, and the glossy finish of melted glass. The elegance of his objects, their over-the-top beauty and scale, the obsessive attention to detail all produce a gasp of surprise—you feel the immediacy of the work, you don’t think about it. This is a rare and exceptional thing in itself, yet the spell of the most obvious sensuous aspects veils the deliberateness of Kadonaga’s excess. Everything he makes is inflected by a subterranean sense of humor that instills a stealthy spark.
These objects are a tour-de-force in terms of craft, the result of Kadonaga’s partnerships with highly skilled woodworkers and paper-makers. The woodworkers are employees in his family’s lumber business; the paper-makers are traditional producers of washi, made from gampi and mulberry pulp. The most fascinating of Kadonaga’s wood objects are composed of finely grained lengths of cedar or cypress trunks that have been cut into paper-thin horizontal strips. The wood is worked while still green, the bark stripped, the log sliced, and the slices glued back together. As the reassembled wood dries, it warps and shrinks, exposing essential aspects of its nature. The log pieces, dating from the 1970s and ’80s, were often exhibited while in the process of seasoning—viewers could hear cracking and snapping as the wood expanded and contracted along its seam lines. This is Kadonaga’s conceptual point. Though his interventions leave no personal stamp, they facilitate the expression of the tree’s essential characteristics.
His works made with paper and glass share the same inclinations. Materials are left to expose their inherent properties without an individuating mark of intervention. The paper works consist of thick slabs of multiple washi sheets, clamped into a solid mass at one end, while the other end is left free to fall eccentrically out of whack and flare open. Kadonaga determines their shape and scale, and he may anticipate the degree of expansion, but that action happens independently of him. The greenish, bubble-shaped heaps of glass are the result of melting shattered fluorescent tubes. A video included in the show documents the stream of melted glass pouring out as it cools and coils itself into its final form—a tall, rounded, curvaceous heap.
Although Kadonaga’s work reflects the sum of the processes required to create it, it would be a mistake to think of it in terms of what in the U.S. was referred to as “process art.” His objects originate in a distinctly Japanese cultural connection to nature and craft that is absent from the 1970s and ’80s process art of Serra, Smithson, and others. While Kadonaga’s work has affinities with the Mono-ha group in Japan, it stands conceptually apart. At this point in 2025, there is something painfully innocent about its odd purity and total abstraction. We have become habituated to topicality, and many artists have deserted the kind of aesthetic experience located in the senses. This subtle, unabashedly beautiful conceptual work allows us an experience that is increasingly rare yet entirely essential.
