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ARTIST Statement
Tokuhiro Kawai
Successor of Narrative Painting
The works of Tokuhiro Kawai is always coloured with beautiful stories.
Ignoring the principles of physics such as gravity and perspective, idealized characters appear inside the picture, creating depth and expression to the view of his world.
Kawai thinks of his production as a synonym to the creation of a particular tale. In fact, the paintings drawn by Kawai portrays a piece of story. The playful sensation many people feel when looking at his picture is solely due to their heart being drawn into the world of his woven story.
The relationship between stories and paintings is originally inseparable. It can be said that paintings has pursued its purpose mainly to represent stories. There are countless examples; from the spirits people worshiped in the ancient times to the miracles of saints and successful historic heros, which explicitly shows the relationship of paintings and tales.
The contradiction of expressing an ongoing story into one still image has influenced the painting technique to produce an original method of ignoring time axis and the principles of physics. This has led to the consequence of the mysterious, deep enchantment symbolized in the “historical painting” or “religious painting” in our images.
From one point of view, the history of painting is a history of representation. As a representation method, painters make use of their originality that sometimes exceed our common sense.
As the result of diverse values and modes of expression through the lapse of time, paintings has made a transit towards individual expressionism. Movies and novels are taking their place to portray stories.
Painted artworks, which seems to be at the edge of maintaing its blood and veins in the form of book illustration, has also altered its position as an aid to the printed media. It now limits itself to represent one scene which differs significantly from the means of expression that prospered in the past.
Kawai's attempt is an another approach concerning the weakening relationship between stories and paintings. Thus, it is an inheritance of the former main stream academic method of painting.
Since his youth, Kawai wanted to trap the stories that passed through him in the form of movies and novels inside his imagination. The classic painting style with liberal expression realized this wish and converted his fantasy into paintings, resulting in the establishment of a technique closely related to the representation of narrative painting.
Nowadays, where god and religion is not so deeply involved in our daily lives as before, Kawai supplements the story's source using his own imagination.
This imagination is an accumulation of his aesthetic perception that defines the allure rooted in the collection of Kwai's art works, which goes further than mimicking classic techniques.
When he was little, he participated in a piano competition where every boy participant received a card of a printed heroic character. A beautiful toy ring was given to girls. Among the excited boys, Kawai was the only one who was furious for not receiving the beautiful toy ring. He, who was honest to his inner aesthetic value, was drawn towards the materialistic beauty of the ring rather than a piece of cardboard.
Even now, what forms the image of Kawai's creation is the packed collection which he prides, carefully selected through his own set of values.
From great master artists such as Van Eyck and Bosch to the modern films and comics, toys, jewelry and even games. In the unchanging diverse world but flooding with innumerable aesthetics, Kawai alone, is fair and sensitive enough to the objects acknowledged as beautiful.
The reason to place Tokuhiro Kawai in line with classic art is because of the existence of allure that goes far beyond a superficial mimic.
A Bagworm living in the forest spins its garment with leaves, while given a colorful yarn, it spins a vivid coloured garment. Needless to say, a bagworm in this sense is the image of a painter. The beautiful garments, are their paintings spun.
Social conditions and emphasized logic brings dark shadows to today's art painting world, but the stories which Kawai spins charm the viewers into the painting, stimulating our curiosity with bursting delight and vivid colours.
