Kana Maeda

Statement

Kana Maeda is an artist from Osaka, Japan, who creates drawings, paintings and installation work. Maeda is fascinated by her own consciousness and sub-consciousness, body and memory. Interested in the processes of memory formation, she often uses her own clothes and photographs in her drawings and sculptures, as past evidence of personal experience.

Maeda started creation with this concept because of her mother’s illness. According to Japanese anatomist Takeshi Yourou: “Technically speaking, even after a cardiac arrest, we cannot say that a person is dead. Sometimes the person who is considered dead, can come back to life. Brain death doesn’t mean a total death”. She started wondering about what kind of thing makes a person keep on living. It can be the body, the internal memory or the thought. Moreover, she has worked in a funeral ceremony hall for a year as a part-time worker. She became curious about how people think about their body. Usually a dead body just looks as if it is sleeping, but they are dead and will be cremated.

The body and memory is very versatile; individuals are believing that their consciousness is staple and never-changing. Maeda is curious about this ambiguity and contradiction.

GlogauAIR Project

At GlogauAIR I would like to work on paintings and video works. Between Japan and Germany, there must be so much environmental and cultural differences, and I would like to express what I would feel and memorize by using video, photos and painting work. Unfortunately or fortunately, I don’t understand German language, therefore I would like to focus on not only visual images, but also sounds, smell in the residency. I also appreciate to exhibit it not only in the white cube gallery, but also somewhere else.

CV Summary

b. 1990 Japan

Education

• 2016 Completed Orientation for art and design short course of CSM in London
• 2012 Completed Bachelor of Fine arts of Kyoto Seika University

Residency

• 2018 Resident artist at ComPeung Artist in Residency in ChiangMai, Thailand

Collaboration

• 2017 Participated Feldstarke International –Culture City of East Asia 2017- (collaboration art work with Korean and Chinese artists and presentation at Kyoto Art center in Japan, Daegu Art Factory in Korea, Hunan University in China)

Exhibition

• 2019 Exhibition Pilot Plant -Most Mannals Take 21 Seconds to Pee- (Group exhibition at Contemporary Art and Spirits in Osaka, Japan)
• 2018 Link project 15 -In Vivo (Group exhibition at Kyoto Municipal museum annex)
• 2018 Connection (Solo Exhibition at ComPeung Artist in Residency in ChiangMai, Thailand)
• 2018 Fragments (Solo-exhibition at Gallery Shibatacho in Osaka, Japan)
• 2017 Link project15 “Disturb the Universe” (Group exhibition at Kyoto art museum annex in Kyoto, Japan)
• 2017 Memorandum (Solo-exhibition at Gallery 1616 in Osaka, Japan）
• 2016 ThePeople passed by me (Solo-exhibition at Tsuchikure Link in Osaka, Japan)
• 2012 Kyoto Seika University graduation exhibition（Group exhibition at Kyoto city museum in Kyoto, Japan）

Gallery