ABOUT

Tomonari Kawano (Japan, 1975) is an artist based in Paris, who works with drawings, paintings, sculptures, photography and video.

His work entwines transcendence of gender and humanity, mythologies, psychology, personal memories and gender politics.

He obtained his MFA with honours at ENSAPC (National Graduate School of Arts of Paris-Cergy) in 2018.

He previously graduated in Fashion design from Bunka Fashion College, Tokyo (1998), which might explain his playing with fabric and mask as a second skin and his uses of his own hair as an aesthetic material.

The face, its shape and the mask are recurrent images in his work.Even if it is heavy to carry, the mask is, for him, a tool, or more than that, a force impossible to escape. The skin, the body and the clothes are also masks. He cuts them, bands them, stretches them, mixes them with his hair. He prunes them like plants that are cut and mutated. In his self-portraits, humans are mixed with animals, the masculine with the feminine. These self-portraits become characters of a great queer circus.

Issues of interest include addressing toxic masculinities, researching and describing socialised, gendered, racialised and biological bodies.

Tomonari Kawano has shown his work in France and Japan in various group exhibitions.