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.

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.

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）