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In many of Taiyo Kimura’s works, common materials such as 1 liter milk packs, black trash bags, rattan linen baskets that you would see often in this country are used. He also handles foods such as seasonings, snacks, curry, tomato cans, and meat that people consume and discharge daily. For example, in “Video as Drawing”, an image of a person washing his face with curry is played repeatedly. In “About the Japanese”, mayonnaise, ketchup, and sauce blends before the viewer. This gives the viewer a kind of undeniably strong antipathy and nausea. The physical antipathy and unpleasantness are in the same category as the sense of discomfort the viewer will feel by the sound of clock hands meeting and frictioning in “Friction/Where is a Lavatory?”, or the variant radio sounds released from multiple earphones at the same time in “Black Hole”.

The physical unpleasantness and sense of discomfort the viewer feels from his works lead to examination of humans institutionalizing and domesticating their own bodies in today’s society, and also point out the complicated relation between individual and mass. For “We know you know we know your pleasure you never know”, about 600 pigeons are placed all over the gallery floor. Each pigeon is handmade by the artist himself. The viewer is to slide over the pigeons a box with a frame and only a bottom plate attached to it or a box with an umbrella on it. The pigeons on the floor have wheels on their heads, so when the box is pushed it glides over the flock. The viewer sometimes needs to walk through the pigeons on the floor to pull back the box. The act of rolling a box-over pigeons with wheels on their heads and bodies painted in dusky gray has its eeriness. In addition, the various elements such as an umbrella that people need yet they forget and sometimes even cast behind or throw away, the irregularly arranged pigeons under the umbrella, and the human as the viewer all speak of group mind, relation between individual and mass, and human consciousness and unconsciousness.

Kimura puts down on his drawing books the physical discomforts, eeriness, and other unusual experiences he has in his daily life. For instance, he wrote down the experience of having his pants pocket getting hooked to the doorknob. He also writes in his note his imaginations and sudden random thoughts. The world written and drawn in Kimura’ s drawing book and his artworks speak calmly of possibilities of another world or a real nature of humans existing in any small experience or sense. He confirms the true nature of humankind and sense of reality by drawing his experiences and imaginations and through creation

Taiyo Kimura (Kamakura, Japan, 1970) gravitates towards the oddities in everyday life. Using mundane materials such as milk cartons, food, magazines and stuffed animals, he creates objects and scenarios that speak to life’s comedy and inadequacy. His art does not imitate life, but gives us humorous, cartoonish renderings of modern society’s peculiarities. With a boyish craft and incisive wit, Kimura transforms the grotesque into hilarious and the ridiculous into charming. The result is a body of work that is as refreshing as it is perplexing.

In his video installation, Typical Japanese English (2005), Kimura hides his video within a basket of laundry. In order to see it, one has to bend down and dig through the pile of clothes, then peer through an open shirt to reveal a hidden monitor. There we find the artist performing a sequence of incomprehensible acts. He holds chopsticks with his eyes while trying to pick up tiny objects. A series of coins are dispensed from the artist’s mouth. A steak gets placed inside a washing machine. Kimura brushes the teeth of a fish, while the fish sticks out of his own mouth. The situations are almost familiar, but the details are all wrong. Together these vignettes point to the futility of life and find humor in our failure. In this case, Kimura himself is the victim as he humbly takes the brunt of his own jokes.

Kimura seems to value the audience’s interaction with his work as much as the object itself. In Black Hole (1995), for example, he engages the viewer through familiar visuals and disorienting sound. Tiny black earphones completely cover a stuffed teddy bear, emitting the noise of seventeen different radio stations all at the same time. Voices and music wash over one another until nothing is discernable or distinguishable. The white noise reminds us of the chaotic energy of Tokyo, while the bear embodies the “cute” aesthetic so familiar in Japanese popular culture. For the viewer, the experience is that of a manga comic come to life in 3-D form.

Comic influence is also evident in an Untitled sculptural work (1997-2005). A row of blue and white milk cartons appear to be a minimalist installation about formal beauty until one looks inside to find little people made of clay. As your eyes move from carton to carton the figures multiply like a 3-D claymation film until they are packed in like sardines. And then suddenly, in the next carton, everyone disappears. The sight of miniature people cramming themselves into an increasingly crowded milk carton speaks simultaneously to the blind following in group behavior and the ridiculousness of today’s society, where everything is commodified and consumed. Kimura’s use of humble materials like milk cartons and clay is one of his trademarks, and likewise a strength of the work, which makes his tragic comedy all the more digestible.

Kimura’s black humor is perhaps most palpable in Hatarake Hatarake (Work Work) (2005), a sculpture of two crawling babies made out of the hexagonal patches on soccer balls. The plush infants look innocent and cuddly, but their soccer ball construction creates an overwhelming urge to kick them across the room. It is this push and pull between the sweet and the naughty that makes Kimura’s work so appealing. In the end, it is the very oddness of his work that shows us how strange life really is.

Trevor Schoonmaker is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA. Hehas organized numerous exhibitions including The Magic City (2000), Propeller (2005), The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Futbol(2006), Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova & Robin Rhode(2007), and the international traveling exhibitions Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (2003-2005) and DTroit(2003-2004). He is the editor of Fela: From West Africa to WestBroadway (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Schoonmaker is currently organizing the traveling retrospective exhibition Barkley L.Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, at the Nasher Museum of Art (February2008).

Anyone seeing for the first time the work of Japanese artist Taiyo Kimura,born in Kamakura in 1970, will be surprised on different levels: first by his method of portraying the body, represented here in various media, then by a plastic execution with the simplest of materials, and finally on account of his subtle sense of humor, which comments on even the most shocking subject—and Kimura has quite a bit that could spoil the appetite—with a wink of the eye.

For his first solo exhibition in Germany, at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Taiyo Kamura assembled in the historic cupola hall a selection of pieces that underlines the diversity of his work. The way he laid out his installation is programmatic. The tall, broad hall is obstructed and its access is regulated through narrow passageways designed to lead us to his artwork in a deliberate fashion. Kimura squeezes his audience into confined spaces and barrages our senses with intrusive, unpleasant video images and sounds, which we would prefer not to experience in the first place. But they allow us no respite: opposite us we see a wall comprised of twenty-four screens with chewing mouths, grinding their food with varying degrees of noise, spitting it out, or making it stick to the lens of the camera. They are magnified views of a body part, which, ignoring its communicative or erotic meaning, is captured in the moment of consumption: a moment governed, in Japan just as in industrial western nations, by strict regimentation. As Kimura demonstrates the process in moving close-ups, he heightens the repulsive effect. He alludes thereby to landmark video pieces by Vito Acconci and Paul McCarthy from the 1970s, which used their own bodies as instruments in controlled performance situations in order to explore perceptions and forms of interaction in an assault on societal taboos. Like Acconci and McCarthy, Kimura also uses the dimensions of the video monitor (which is about the same size as a human head), and for Kimura, too, the emphasis is on the close-up and “close space,” which acts as a kind of space of contact with the viewer. As he arranges screens of different size next to and on top of each other, he suggests the presence of a group (with large and small heads).

It is his play with what we consume as nourishment, the in and out between the interior and the exterior of the body, that Kimura makes the most of here. It is thus not about the simple provocation of the observer but rather the dissolution of body boundaries. To reveal the interior, the already chewed up, the already digested, and to transport it back to the exterior, is not only a breach of societal conventions but also a confrontation with artistic and social stereo types of representation and perception through the transgression of boundaries. All transitional forms have in this sense an undermining effect: every appearance, be it a representation of a body or objects that do not fit the norm, subvert the current order. If we precede from the thesis that body boundaries cannot be observed independently of the functioning of other societal and cultural boundaries, a discrepancy from, if not a threat to, societal norms become manifest in the transgression or penetration of body boundaries.

The sculptures that Kimura has developed under the title Routine should also be understood against this background. They are masculine figures depicted standing next to one another against a wall, apparently urinating. Their misshapen, overweight bodies are stuck in baggy track suits, which in themselves have something revolting about them. Kimura continues his play here with corporeal provocation, depicting weakness and incontinence: puddles on the floor and pee stains on the pants. The faucets to which they are connected add the ironic pendant. At no time do his figures seem “natural,” even when they appear disturbingly familiar; nor “alive,” the illusion ironically shattered by the alienating effect of the faucets put in place of heads. Here, as in his video wall, the artist makes palpable the all-too-human, he really shifts us into the flesh in making apparent what normally can take place only covertly. These images are quotidian, indeed almost insignificant, and yet they have the power to touch us in an unpleasant way. In this lies the core of the artist’s work. It is from the strange and contradictory elements of ordinary life that he creates his confrontation with questions of identity, group psychology, and the relationship between mind and body. Situations that take place every day in rush-hour traffic: shoulder to shoulder with others whose touch, smell, and noises one cannot escape. The tension and annoyance of our own bodies make all the more palpable to us the experience of persons in such a situation; individual boundaries and individual needs—in short, the captivity in the individual body—dominates perception and denies every attempt at rational control. This experience exposes the division between mind and body as a fiction and makes us conscious of our dependency on all bodily things.

For Kimura, life, with all its impositions and repulsions, should find its way into art. In all of these things, however, he lets us smile, and then in the next moment cooks up new screwy images and ideas. The best examples of this are his meticulously crafted drawings and the accompanying texts that, as funny as they are, have something quite poetic about them. Scribbled directly on the wall we read: “I like the garbage, trash, dust, and dirt that gets pushed to the sides of the highways and collects there. / I like this bleak picture because it escapes the attention of people who race by in their cars along the road. / Hence it is allowed to be dirty.”

With his interest in the roadside Kimura also directs his attention to the margins of society, to the failures, the homeless, the scum. In this process of artistic confrontation, the individual body functions as a metaphor: “It is still fresh in my memory that, in the hospital, / I swallowed a stomach probe. An unusual case: / A thin tube forced its way into my body. As it did I was just like a piece of meat. / I had the same sensation when I saw a dead cat on the side of the road. / Just like the cat, like a piece of meat, that’s how my own corpse looks.” Or elsewhere: “I am terribly ashamed to hear my own voice recorded on tape. / It sounds like my naked genitals. / I reveal myself like a person of the lowest origins.”

In these observations, movement and communication between interior and exterior and between the individual body and the mass of society are the focus again and again. The observations are thus about the problematic, if not wholly impossible, relationship between the inner and outer world: “I recently saw a blind man fighting his way through a throng of people / at the station with a cane / The clattering blind man’s stick hit passersby. He was in a panic. / I imagine it, I close my eyes / and walk like a blind man through the throng of people. / I panic myself.” At times, Kimura’s observations also capture loving relationships that come about only through is understandings:”My friend’s budgie flirts with my friend’s thumb / It seems he wants to have an affair with the thumb. / Thus he is pitiable. / It is strange that through this pity I, too, begin to consider my thumb as a living thing.”

In other cases, these graffiti are to be understood as performance sketches that boil down to making absurd or annulling our world, with its countless machines and instruments, through simple interventions. A dog appears covered in pocket calculators, displaying numbers when one pets him. Or two shopping bags on wheels that roll away as soon as a stranger approaches. In this panopticon of curiosities there are so-called hot-water bottle people, who obtrusively and unpleasantly give off heat, and conveyor belts lying on one another that serve solely to move each other. Another scene has a sewn-together suit in which hundreds of thrashing mice are stuck. A particular exercise consists in “back-to-back handing over of a cat” or in an all-out chow-down from the same bowl with one’s own dog. Kimura thus limits the technologized world of the everyday with natural phenomena and thenceforth develops situations characterized by seemingly childlike comedy. By directing his gaze to things and situations that discreetly and unexpectedly run counter to normality, the artist demonstrates the absurdity of our world.

Kimura’s research terrain is the gutter, the muggy tightness of a packed subway train, the dusty side of the road, and the urine-soaked corner—in the broader sense, these are the corners of our consciousness in which there is place for the embarrassing, the repressed, the depraved—there Kimura goes looking for clues. For the plastic execution of these ideas he uses the simplest materials: papier-mâché, straw, fabric tarpaulins, worn-out clothes, and empty milk cartons. At the same time, his sculpturally worked-out installations develop a particular aesthetic that lends a new form to the repressed.

He finds a highly expressive title for this approach in his central installation A Dream from Which One Cannot Awake: A whole flock of pigeons populates the middle of the cupola hall—not very attractive themselves in their dirty, uniform gray, as though they too stood as a metaphor for the proverbial “gray masses”—undefined, exchangeable, faceless. “Pigeons” whose heads are made from swivel casters. They derive their function from an open framework that may be moved by the visitors over the flock of pigeons as though in flight. In this “cage” a group of pigeon heads sits closely packed, larger than and in no way appropriate to the seated pigeon bodies, though just as gray and anonymous—though in any case turned towards one another, almost conspiratorially close together, as though they share a special knowledge. Here the artist is concerned with the power of crowd psychology, the particular explosive power of which consists in this case of being controlled by “leading heads,” who are in turn blind and are fit at best to turn around on the back of the crowd.

The confrontation of the individual with the crowd plays an important role in Kimura’s at first rather minimalist-seeming milk carton installation. This arranging in rows of common Japanese milk cartons contains its own secret. Like in a 3-D animation film, small figures appear to gather in the individual boxes and to pack themselves in ever more densely from carton to carton, like in elevators. A close inspection reveals that, at a specific point, they begin to seek out our gaze, this happening as soon as the interior distress threatens to become unbearable. As though this were the only way to escape peer pressure.

Seen from these viewpoints, Kimura’s work cannot easily be placed in the context of international contemporary art. As much as his video performances resemble the early video works of Paul McCarthy and Vito Acconci and his sculptures are reminiscent, at times, of those of Sarah Lucas, his works only have a qualified relationship to the artistic developments that emerged in the 1990s in the United States and Western Europe. His art is deeply Japanese—naturally only insofar as we are entitled at all to place artistic expressions directly in the context of social and economic factors. It is possible to make this connection because Kimura himself traces the fundamentals of his work to these sorts of origins. It is about a certain social atmosphere that characterized Japan in the 1990s, after the rapid economic growth of the 1980s had ended in the collapse of the so-called bubble economy and its overheated consumerism. According to Kimura, a markedly apocalyptic mood became noticeable in popular consciousness, something that also found expression in the artistic developments of the last ten years. The generation of young artists of the 1990s expressed their mistrust of the existing social system and its culture of repression with two different tendencies: on the one hand, by exploiting images of a continually available computer-generated virtual world, and on the other, by addressing the body, its uncontrollability and its transience, in a fundamental way.

With his work developed from both performative and sculptural elements, Kimura walks a middle path between the artists Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami, strongly influenced by Manga culture, on the one hand, and representatives of the Japanese Arte Povera movement, Saburo Muraoka and Chiharu Shiota, on the other. Like Shiota, Kimura works only indirectly with his own body, since he acts in his video performances only for the camera or transfers the body experience onto his sculptures and installations. The extraordinary aspect to his work is the concentration on the plastic qualities of the physical; he equips his figures with mechanical instruments so as to rob them of their “natural” character. For him, the body is part of the social system in which it—like a technical device—must function. The unpleasant spaces into which people are always forced are Kimura’s central theme—making conscious the absurdity of this way of life is his artistic endeavor.

In 1980 Sony invented the Walkman, nothing but an easily portable cassette recorder, later also radio, with headphones. From a technical point of view this was nothing special – a fact which, initially, even threatened its market introduction because, for some inside the company, it did not meet certain technological standards. But the success was overwhelming, as was the immediate international reception. This sort of user orientation had a revolutionary impact. In 1984 Shuhei Hosokawa analysed the relevant phenomena, summing them up as the Walkman effect. The most remarkable of which is an isolation from the surroundings. The urban space is explored on foot walking or running, its pervasive sound scape shut out. The portable sound, characterized by its own tempo, together with the bearer’s movements causes a different sense of space. The Walkman brings forth an autonomy on the part of the bearer who may wrap her/himself in music’s, albeit deceptive, “splendid isolation.” Those around, however, are refused access to the listener and her/his choice of music. Hosokawa refers to an example of the mechanism of closeness and distance: “At a party a boy hesitates to approach the girl he’s in love with. Nevertheless he gets her to dance with him. Very calmly he steps close and puts one ear-piece of his headphones to her ear so that she may also hear “his” music. They are enclosed by “their” music. The happy couple dance to a different music, a different rhythm from the rest of the guests.” This stroke of luck agreeably contrasts with the overall lack of communication. The apparatus creates connection and distance. On the one hand being independent, and hence isolated, the radio user simultaneously and “blissfully” submits to a flood of information from above. One is a part of the “lonely crowd.” In his experience of space the individual is swallowed up by the masses.

In 1970 Taiyo Kimura was born into a generation that grew up against this background and was confronted precisely with these problems. ln 1995 he took a look at the situation in his work Black Hole. Approaching from the middle distance one makes out the contours of a light-coloured teddy bear on a pedestal. What attracts attention is some black dots at first hard to identify. What initially might be taken for flies swarming around the animal when getting closer turns out to be scores of earphones sprouting from the teddy. And one also increasingly becomes aware of a mixture of sounds. Close up these are recognizable as a multitude of different radio programs. Though hardly one will be able to differentiate the exact number-it is sixteen stations. Merely at the full hour an imperfect simultaneity may be noticeable: the jingles announcing the news. After that the programs disperse. The single is dispersed in the sea of information and stimuli. The indifference, the impossibility of filtering out, the proliferation of media are causing an abyss which one is lost in: the Black Hole. The object reverses the principle of isolation. That which, turned inward, cannot but be interpreted as an overstimulation for one person is being multiplied (there is around 400 phones)and turned outward. The revenge of the Walkman changes into the revenge of the cuddly toy.

Mass psychology, or mob psychology, is the force behind many of Kimura’s works and reflects a marked feature of Japanese society, i.e. the disciplined masses. A clear manifestation of this trait may be observed in the sophisticated transport system the functioning of which is the necessary precondition for the prospering of economical as well as private life cycles. While the subway stations are its coordinating points and nerve centres. The poison gas attack by the Aum sect, in which several subway lines in Tokyo were simultaneously hit on 3rd March 1995, consciously targeted this system. The nerve gas was set free there not just with a view to a high number of victims but in order to cause social collapse, a psychological elimination. The apocalyptic imagination of the radicalized community, whose appeal in equal measure might be symptomatic for a situation of radical social changes, obviously aimed at the very centre of the traffic network.

In his 1997 book, “Underground, The Tokyo Gas Attack,” Haruki Murakami, by means of interviews with victims and perpetrators, has attempted to retrace what happened and how individuals have come to terms with it. What is remarkable about the accounts of the victims is not only the trauma itself but the course of events during the attack which latter, at first, could not be made out as such. Each individual, with her or his functions and duties within the system, noticed different things. Especially the initial not knowing how to react to the poisonous liquid, respectively its vapours, and, finally, the realization of how grave the danger actually was. The subsequent actions of the people and the helplessness in handling the situation illustrated, with all possible implications, the soundness but also the vulnerability of the network of connections. Highly significant, for instance, was the immediate distinction made between prostrate victims and people walking along the other side of the road as if nothing had happened. Suddenly there were two systems one of which everyone was inevitably subsumed under. The dividing of society in two in the short term had succeeded. Precisely this aspect has occupied the Japanese analysts lastingly.

Moreover the interviews have shown that the individual reactions of the survivors to such a trauma often are causing irreversible damages to the soul and tragic incisions in the manner of living. ln 1997, i.e. in the year the book was published, Taiyo Kimura gave his answer in the form of a performance. His activities in the subway have been documented photographically for the influential Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo(BT). By putting a clear plastic bag over his head and mingling with the crowds of fellow passengers he highlighted the feelings of restrictedness, the shortage of space and oxygen, the claustrophobia. The most oppressive thing, however, without a doubt was the indifference of the bystanders. The artist additionally emphasized the absurdity of such situations by hanging some underpants out as if to dry on the handrails of a train car. The indifference was given a fitting answer.

The bringing together of what does not belong together particularly characterizes Kimura’s minute drawings fitted with texts which he scrupulously collects in books. From this refuge of ideas and experiences, almost taking on the character of a diary, he draws forth a concentrate in order to develop his performances and objects. The sceneries are arranged loosely and without consideration for the rectangular surface. From this picture material the artist chooses ideas he then transfers. one-to-one, onto the walls of the exhibition rooms thus evoking graffiti in public toilets. The crowd aspect keeps recurring, such as the people who do not want to wake from their dreams, or people licking the floor. In Innsbruck KIMURA cleverly positioned this latter scene on the gallery wall close to the floor so that the visitors have to bend down or get down on their knees to be able to make out the drawing and thus to take on, involuntarily, the posture of those portrayed. At the same time thus showing their backside to the receptionist. What is also causing trepidation is the idea of mice being sewn into an item of clothing. The outward shape of a person is thus animated by the restless and aggressive movements of the locked in. In the drawings the artist gives poignant expression to a widespread impression within Japanese society, a feeling of being “full up” or “fat up.” In a strange ambivalence one accommodates a self-image of basically having everything one needs while, at the same time, suffering from angst. Man is being degraded and harnessed into a hopeless circulation of consumption for its own sake. He is no more but a peripheral temporary store in which commerce let loose leaves ingestion and excretion to degenerate into a banal ritual. A tea ceremony in which the leaves are taken in the mouth and chewed, hot water poured on top and everything spit out, this is only one possible travesty making apparent the undermining of tradition. Under the telling title Video as a Drawing the partial realization of such ideas in short sequences of performances has been summed up. Being provocative, highly imaginative and extraordinarily physical Kimura creates very personal allegories of ingestion and excretion in the era of mass consumption.

The new work, Untitled, created for Innsbruck 2002, brings to the point the interrelation between isolated individual elements and the homogenization within a closed, all-encompassing system. From a distance all that can be made out at first is a humming, vibrating white box. On stepping up and looking inside one will detect countless tiny, perpendicular paper cylinders. Laughing faces, fixed onto tiny metal springs, are restlessly moving to and fro-each inside its own cylinder, all of them agitated by the same electric massage device, yet without any prospect of ever being able to get into contact with each other. The collapse of the crowd will happen as soon as the -invisible-device stops shivering.

Permanent change and the immobility of the outward fixing are set in a volatile relation to each other. The disappearing of the individual in the crowd, among an unbelievable amount of information and stimuli, the self-referential, a breakout forever beyond hope, the realization that everything is linked to everything else, the realization that individuality is an illusion-all these points of merge, in Kimura’s oeuvre, to create an autonomous zone of black humor.

Circuits of Communication

People today often push negative realities out of their conscious mind, and it seems to me that this is extremely unhealthy. It is a time when people tend to keep their feelings closed off from other people and from reality. -Taiyo Kimura

Taiyo Kimura fills his sketchbooks with simple drawings and notes, recording his daily thoughts and perceptions as if keeping a diary. He then converts these impressions into plans and possible images for his art. Not all of these jottings are turned into finished artworks,but they have a unique power of arousing physcial sensations in the viewer as well as expressing a subtle black humor. In one of Kimura’s works, Black Hole 1996, he places earphone speakers all over a cute little stuffed bear with white fur. Each speaker is connected to one of 17 different radio stations, producing a raucous cacophony of voices and music. A stuffed toy ordinarily has a comforting effect on the emotions, but this one is associated with an unpleasant mixture of noises that cancel each other out. It’s a humorous expression of the difficulty of communication.

Untitled 1997, is composed of nine battery－powered balls that shuffle about awkwardly within the confines of a frame. This humorous work evokes the situation of an individual who wants to act on his own but cannot escape the effects of group psychology. In Not Yet Titled 1997, a number of garbage bags are suspended from the ceiling, and a leg protrudes from each one of them, trembling jerkily in the air. Kimura says that he got the idea for this work from the nervous tics of a middle－aged man he observed on a train. It has an odd sense of reality, giving viewers a vague feeling that they have seen something similar somewhere before.

All of these works directly express a sense of strangeness, discomfort, or mystery that Kimura has discovered in the inconsequential events of daily life. Kimura recalls that he was physically and psychologically weak as a child and had a severe inferiority complex. Communicating his perceptions, however ephemeral, through art has given him a way of reaching out to others and obtaining a kind of liberation.

The making of these works begins with the artist confirming his own sense of reality. The process of showing them opens a circuit of communication with others and empowers the artist. Kimura states that the more he makes art the less he understands it, and there are undoubtedly many visitors to the museum who will empathize with this feeling of being unable to understand. It is not necessary for art to provide solutions to the problems we face. The process of making art requires the artist to reflect on his own physical sensations and provide viewers with an opportunity to reflect on their own responses. Anyone who sees the work can sense the artist’s seriousness and honesty and his determination to examine his perceptions with the greatest care. As the artist notes, humor has an important role to play in dealing with experience. When a person realizes that there is something wrong with the way things are, the ability to laugh at the situation can be a key to survival.

Kimura’s materials are mostly recycled everyday objects or junk that has no value. He rejects fussiness and finish, deliberately leaving his work in a raw condition. He seems to be stubbornly resisting the attractions of physical beauty, avoiding putting his intense emotions into a commercially viable form. At the moment a piece turns into “art”, it loses its riskiness and strangeness. Because Kimura appeals to raw physical sensations and attempts to eliminate any distance between the work and its audience, beauty, craftsmanship, and an “art-like” appearance are obstacles to effective communication. By bringing his work as close as possible to odd phenomena that he notices on the street, Kimura gets closer to the reality he is seeking. He wants to avoid being like people try to get by with superficial smiles and trivial conversation, which only increase the distance between people, to avoid creating situations which seem phony.

When you realize that you can neither destroy, nor escape from, the society that surrounds you, it becomes painful to go on living in it and observing what you see there. Many people have put jotted down grumblings of the same type that fill Kimura’s sketchbooks in their diaries and notebooks, but in the end they just put them away. Kimura, on the other hand, transforms his observations into art and shows it in public. The practice of art provides a method of sharing with others that makes it possible for him to stay alert and moving forward.