Japanese artist Yoshitoshi Kanemaki transforms camphor wood into life-size figures that oscillate between sanity and madness, exploring the tension between life and death through the quiet intensity of contemporary Japanese art.
Yoshitoshi Kanemaki, a leading figure in Japan’s contemporary sculpture scene, carves hyperreal human forms from solid camphor wood. His work merges psychological depth with surreal distortion, revealing how beauty and imperfection coexist within a single body — an idea that echoes Japan’s philosophical balance between control and chaos.
Camphor Wood: Matter, Scent, and Memory
Kanemaki’s chosen material, camphor wood, is celebrated for its durability, reddish-brown grain, and sharp, spicy scent. Native to East Asia, it has long been used in sacred and domestic artefacts. In his hands, the material becomes a medium of multiplicity: faces split, torsos evolve, and identities fracture into multiple emotional states. Each sculpture captures the fragile coexistence of calm and delirium.
Process and Craft: From Trunk to Presence
His process is both technical and meditative. Kanemaki traces grid lines across the log before chiselling it into form, leaving visible marks of creation. These remnants — saw cuts, raw textures, the ghost of the trunk — record the work’s passage from matter to consciousness. Through his social media, he shares this slow metamorphosis, turning craftsmanship into philosophical reflection.
Life, Death, and the Imperfect Beauty
Mortality is not an ending but a presence within his sculptures. The veins and imperfections of the wood remain exposed, evoking the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi — beauty found in impermanence and flaw. Each piece exists between decay and transcendence, where the human figure becomes both vessel and echo of time.
Interpreting Material and Mind
Kanemaki’s sculptures invite a reflection on how material can hold memory, emotion, and transformation — a dialogue explored in depth through the anatomy of his surreal imagination. His work turns the physical grain of camphor wood into a metaphor for consciousness itself, where every cut and imperfection becomes a record of the body’s passage through time.
Recognition and Global Reach
Yoshitoshi Kanemaki’s works have been exhibited across Japan, including installations at Park Hotel Tokyo, and have gained global attention for their poetic ambiguity. His universe, suspended between dream and realism, positions him among the most distinctive contemporary sculptors redefining the language of the body. Follow his updates and works on Facebook.
