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.
