Kazuo Kadonaga, with his piece "Glass No. 41, 1999"

Photo by Ann-Marie Stillion

By Ann-Marie Stillion

originally published January 18, 2002

The gigantic green glass globes at the Greg Kucera Gallery seem to hover above the old wooden floor, although each is actually perched on a white platform just one meter square. They are similar in shape not because the artist "made" them that way, but because he built an environment to test how the glass might act under certain conditions.

For more than 30 years, conceptual artist Kazuo Kadonaga has been pursuing a singular passion: to discover just how minimally he can interact with his materials while simultaneously making something new. So in one project he sliced a huge log into pieces as thin as paper. In another project, he set thousands of silkworms to work in a huge matrix of wood.

Though he uses a variety of materials and approaches, there are nonetheless commonalities in each piece he creates. Whether wood, bamboo, silk or glass, he studies the chemistry, the engineering and the biology of the medium as a scientist or builder might.

A self-taught artist from Japan, where education and tradition are considered paramount, Kadonaga has proven the ability to create his own challenges.

Sometimes his interests have led him to make simple woodcarvings; other times, like in the case of the pieces at the Kucera Gallery, he pursues an idea for years to simply find out for himself how something might react in extraordinary conditions. In this instance, he's using common green glass.

Fifteen years ago, knowing nothing about glass, he visited a factory that made everyday glasses and dishes. He told the owner that he wanted to make the biggest piece of glass possible. "Big glass," he laughed, throwing his arms in the air. The factory told him what he wanted to do was impossible.

But it was impossible only because the machinery and the methods did not exist for the scale he was considering, so he began experimenting, which eventually led to his first large-scale pieces five years ago.

In the corner of the Kucera Gallery, a video demonstration shows how the glass becomes the shapes you see.

Hot glass is poured constantly from two stories up for 30 hours or more, while shards of glass are shoveled every 15 minutes or so into a furnace. After several days, the maximum size is reached and the cooling process begins -- three months or more are needed to slowly lower the temperature of the artwork to keep it from disintegrating or cracking.

In the pursuit of making glass weighing which may be 3000 pounds or more, Kadonaga renovated a former stone factory to make a custom studio in Tsurugimachi, the small town near the Sea of Japan where he was born. There, his father and grandfather ran the family lumber business, and he was supposed to follow in their footsteps.

He told me that long before his interest in glass began, he began bringing home huge logs from his family's forest to watch how they disintegrated. His family, naturally, thought it was a waste of materials.

But Kadonaga was very interested in exploring the logs' properties and sought to share that experience with others. He once turned his logs into performance by seating gallery visitors in the center of a room full of logs so they could "listen" to the sounds of logs drying.

Although being raised in the painstaking and meticulous world of Japanese craft may have influenced him in some hidden ways, the artist claims to have little interest in traditional craft. He is seeking to pose problems and set up processes that boggle audiences.

At the artist's discussion at the Suyama Space in Seattle last week, ceramist Patti Warashina was in the audience. It was the first time she had seen his work, and she found herself both intrigued and delighted.

What looks like a 30-foot log stripped of its bark bisects the gallery space. We're told it has been sliced into about 1,000 layers.

"This one's really incredible. A log that's like paper. Have you touched it? It's so thin, it's become like sheets of paper," Warashina marveled.

"It's a fantastic show. You have to take a second look at it. You can appreciate it from the pure aspect of aesthetic beauty, but he adds the other dimension of his process."

She also points out that his work is definitely Asian in perspective. "This is not the West," she said, waving towards a wall of long curving bamboo rising to the ceiling at Suyama.

Indeed, Kadonaga's meticulous approach to process and a unique desire to understand nature in his own way have led to his work being collected by some of the greatest museums in the United States and Europe. He noted that only now, since the glass phase, has a Japanese audience become been truly engaged in his art.

The director of the Salt Lake Art Center, Ric Collier, came to Seattle to install the work at the Suyama Space.

Collier said, "He's really interested in not making an object out of log. He's interested in making a process out of a log. He wants to take things that are identifiable and push you past what is identifiable to find out what the natural affinities might be."

As a young artist, Kadonaga started out painting. But after he saw American contemporary conceptual art, he said, he knew what he really wanted to do. He decided to become a conceptual artist in the manner of Donald Judd or Carl Andres. His dream is to do art "that American artists cannot imitate. Work that American artists can never do."

Rebellion and the pushing of boundaries have led to his latest project, which is to build an even bigger furnace and create a process that could eventually lead to the production of a glass piece on the largest scale possible.

He explains that a museum in Japan may purchase from the next series of glass experiments that may grow to an even more fantastic size. He has built three chimneys in his studio, and the second and third are waiting for the money needed to make more "big glass.