Over recent years Tanaka Kazuhiko’s minute human figures expressed the fleeting, seemingly ordinary scenes of daily life which quickly become the past. In Tanaka’s words, this makes these transient events ‘precious.’ However, his most recent work evokes the unreal world of his first body of work called the Flying Figures, which were inspired by his dreams where human beings, like aerialists, could soar weightlessly into the air.

Yet this new body of work is not precisely an aria de capo. The Dreamscape figures emerge from a deeper level of the subconscious where reality and fantasy are synthesized, recognizable as humans, but mysterious--often troubling--in their physical appearance and actions. As though to heighten the power of these dream beings and draw us into their unreal worlds, Tanaka has begun to increase the size of his delicate figures, which are made from a clay comprised of finely ground stone.

Having graduated from Tokyo’s National University of Fine Arts and Music, for more than thirty-five years Tanaka Kazuhiko has worked as an architect in Tokyo. He has called his figures “mini-sculptures created by an architect who does not like large buildings.” He is truly a product of the extremes in modern Japanese culture known for various forms of miniaturization as well as complex architecture on a grand scale.

William Thrasher