Maki Fine Arts is pleased to present Construction Cross Section, a Shunsuke Kano solo exhibition, starting Saturday, October 22, 2016. Born 1983 in Osaka, Japan, Shunsuke Kano completed his graduate studies at Kyoto Saga University of Arts in 2010.

"Instead of capturing the photo by looking at the image, it must be captured by looking at the physical matter covered by an image."
-Shunsuke Kano

True to his intensions, through utilization of photographs, Kano has been presenting works that question the act of looking by generating awareness of the complex layers. Kano's major shows include Photography Will Be (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 2014) and Shunsuke KANO | Jenga and Fountain for the 8th shiseido art egg (Shiseido Gallery 2014). Recently, his pursuits have expanded into collaborative work with other artists as well as art book publication. Undertakings such as the publication of "THE COPY TRAVELLERS" (Shunsuke Kano, Teppei Sako, Yaya Ueda) and the collaborative art installation Three Bodies, About 180 Trillion Cells (Yuta Hayakawa, Akira Takaishi, Shunsuke Kano) have allowed Kano to hold discussions and experiment with various artists and to push the boundaries on new means of expression.
This will be Kano's fourth solo show at Maki Fine Arts following Baumkuchen and Flat Surfaces (2013), Fountain Mountain (2014), and Cool Breeze On The Rocks (2015). His upcoming show Construction Cross Section will feature new works including the "specious notion" series consisting of photos captured in Singapore as well as his video work. The artist's continuous development can be seen through his most recent creations depicting Singapore's transformation caused by urban development in places like construction sites.

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Futoshi Hoshino
(Critic of aesthetics and representational culture -- Kanazawa College of Art professor)

Without fail, when viewing works by Shunsuke Kano, one is filled with the joy of a new discovery. The discovery is never an abstruse education forced upon us, but rather always accompanied by an effervescent joy. His works--while carefully avoiding an entranced stance of enlightenment toward the viewer and, at the same time, obliviously showing new views to the world--are filled with a detached dignity, because of those facts indeed.
As the unconstrained title suggests, one of his recent representative works "layer of my labor" is a vibrant work showing manipulation of multiple existing layers and is a product of exceptional critical consciousness about a photograph's surface. Be that as it may, it is clear by looking at his older works such as "WARP TUNNEL"--a concentration of the primitive surprise felt when looking at a photo--or "B&B"--a result of the sharp insight on the shape of the world--that the artist has never wavered from his witty stance since the beginning of his career.
The most surprising discovery about Kano's works is that these products full of intelligent critical consciousness are somehow always cloaked in a humorous appearance. Those who view the artist's works will no doubt be tempted to find words to describe the joy they feel for discovering that humor. Although, there is nothing more ill-fitting to that joy than the rhetoric exchanged by stern-faced viewers standing in front of the works. Perhaps, that is exactly the single most important lesson we must gain when experiencing Shunsuke Kano's works.

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Interview in Towards
http://towards.info/ShunsukeKano.html