Glass (The Urban Glass Art Quarterly), #107: Urban Glass, New York Contemporary Glass Center, summer 2007.
In the case of glass, contemporary means that artists clearly have their themes. The themes of glass artists tend to be ambiguous, because almost glass artists concentrate only techniques and the characteristics of glass materials, such as fragility, transparency and reflection. Compared with other materials, ceramic, metal, textile and wood, it is difficult for artists to control glass well. Therefore, glass artists cannot regard glass as medium. Artists fit glass with their works, as if they forgot their themes.
This article is about Jun Kaneko, a Japanese glass artist. His work is vertical and hulking glass planks. It has many horizontal and vertical lines inside glass, looking like the Morse code. He is materially a maximalist, but conceptually a minimalist. He, as if he were a pictorial linguist, expresses simply visual language by glass. He seems to make his work by a new semantics that he invents. The source of his work is the process of vocabulary building when he could not speak English. He knows what it means to build vocabulary and learn a language. In his work, all of glass pieces seem to speak themselves and talk each other, namely communication. He has a firm concept and uses glass to express his ideas. The translucence of glass interests him. He wants viewers not only to see inside the shape, but also to look at inside his creative process. That is why he chooses glass as medium.
This article let readers tell new potentialities in glass. Jun Kaneko is free from the characteristic of glass. Rather, he uses glass as if he drew a picture. I have never seen artists using glass to express simply visual language. He does not depend on glass materials, but he extracts the good characteristics of glass. It might be that glass artists reach other material artists.
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As the author of the articles writes, “Conceptually a minimalist, Kaneko is materially a maximalist.” The key to understanding Kaneko’s work is found in this sentence. Kaneko thinks and works big. The article gives a good overview of where he came from (painter, ceramicist/sculptor) to reach his current state of making. Above all, it gives us insight into how he creates his “complex visual language” of lines and other geometric marks. Although he has learned another language, I am not sure he “knows what it means to build vocabulary and learn a language,” as Rui suggests. To be truly fluent in another language, does it mean one must try different languages (in the case of Kaneko, painting and ceramics)? Or can one only achieve fluency after they have worked with their chosen medium over and over again?
This brings me to another interesting point, regarding medium. I am intrigued by Rui’s statement, “glass artists cannot regard glass as medium. Artists fit glass with their works, as if they forgot their themes.” If this is the case for Kaneko, what is his “works”? Or theme for that matter? Regardless, a language of some sort is clearly developing in his glass explorations. Indeed, the size of his work is truly one of maximalism (as it relates to glass) while his method of mark-making, with all its simplicity, is one of minimalism.
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