The Dance of Life in the Art of Shunga Devotee Shinichi Kaneko

Many avant-garde artists of the 20th century, whose works now cost a fortune, tried to push the limits of visual art and overcome its immobility. The first name that comes to mind is Jackson Pollock, with his rhythmic ornaments embodying motion itself. Making shunga his main inspiration, the Japanese artist Shinichi Kaneko depicts the entanglement of the floating world instead of a bunch of separate objects, thus masterfully combining Japanese tradition with avant-garde striving for dynamics.

Fig. 1. Shinichi Kaneko (shinichikaneko.com)

Fig. 2. Homage to Hokusai (Instagram.com)

Fig. 4. Instagram.com

Fig. 5. Homage to Moronobu (Instagram.com)

Fig. 6. Tsukioka Yukitsune Niyoru Shunyohigi Izu Scroll 12 Limbs and Hands (Instagram.com)

Cosmic Order as Shunga Twister

Shinichi Kaneko was born in 1974 in Aichi. Twenty-five years old, he graduated from the Department of Design, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. Two years later, he completed a Master's Degree in Design at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the same university. In 2013, Kaneko started creating the Couple series based on the art of shunga and gradually extended the theme to other media, such as sculpture, embroidery, and textile design. His attention is primarily attracted to the entangled limbs of the figures engaged in the intercourse. Kaneko's first solo show happened in 2004 at Ichy's Gallery in Tokyo. His works deserved a Prize at the Concrete Art Museum Exhibition in Aichi in 2005 and an Honorable Mention Award at the 9th Kiyosu City Haruhi Painting Triennale in Aichi in 2018. Apart from making art, from 2001 to 2015, he worked as a lecturer at the department where he once studied. As Kaneko says in his art statement, since the discovery of shunga, which happened in a period of creative block, everything in this world seems to him a tangle of limbs.

Fig. 7. The Circle of Hands, cement, pigment, glass, wood, after Utagawa Kunitora’s Otome Sugata, ca. 1826 (tumblr.com)

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Click HERE for the sensual homages to shunga by Masako Asaba

Sources: shinichikaneko.com; instagram.com/kanekoshinichi_art/; Interview with artist: a-n-d-now.tokyo/kaneko