Year: 2022
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 227.3 x 227.3 cm (89 1/2 x 89 1/2 in.)
Acquired from N&A Art SITE, 2023
This artwork was presented at the solo exhibition “line & colors,” held at N&A Art SITE, an art space organized by art critic and curator Fumio Nanjo. Color and lines are distinctive features in Kawauchi’s work, and Nanjo interprets line as the spirit, and colors as the body. His assessment, in no uncertain terms, is that Kawauchi’s work is elevated by the way that the artist sublates the oppositional relationship between the two. In this piece, a dynamic set of lines is used to portray an enormous upper body that cradles a heart. A chain of animal and human heads surrounds the figure, evoking a sense of the beastly nature that lurks in the shadows of humanity. An overwhelming mass of red forms the basis of the work’s color palette, and that serves as a fitting representation of the body. The spirit is the metaphysical essence of a human being, as opposed to the materiality of the body. Kawauchi lives with doubts about the fundamental, life-sustaining activities of eating, digesting, and excreting. Indeed, the fact that these uncertainties occupy no small part of the artist’s mind is the motivation for her creative practice. However, this spiritual side harbors contradictions that are torturous for the body. Nanjo refers to Agamben in describing Kawauchi’s inner conflict as love likely with Agamben’s concept of “bare life” (zoe) in mind. Kawauchi does not live within society in the conventional sense. This is a unique painting of the spirit and the body that could only have been created by Kawauchi, who has persistently confronted and resisted the purity of life of a human as an animal.
