Jun Kaneko sculpting Sanbon Ashi at Temple City Studio, CA, 1968. Courtesy of the artist.
It took a strong artistic personality to land smack in the middle of the California clay revolution of the 1960s and emerge with a wholly individualistic formal language. Jun Kaneko is just such a case. Born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942, he initially came into contact with sculptural ceramics through the collector Fred Marer—a man of modest means, but one of very few who realized the importance of what was being made in the medium. (Marer’s collection is now at Scripps College.) Through this connection, Kaneko went on to study in the mid-1960s with Peter Voulkos, who impressed him deeply with his physicality and intuitive manner of working. “I could speak no English,” Kaneko later recalled, “so I had to rely totally on my visual sense. I became an expert reader of facial expressions and body language and, in a work of art, of the currents that go beyond logic and verbal expression.”¹
From Voulkos he took not so much a specific artistic style as a general sense of ambition, which has found its ultimate expression in the sculpture he makes today at his epically scaled studio in Omaha, Nebraska. The work shown here is, like the piece featured in Objects: USA, from Kaneko’s series Sanbon Ashi (“three legs”). He has said that the curious tripod stance came from his desire to create a form in implied motion. Its bold patterning, a holdover from his earlier practice as a painter, is a feature that he has retained in later bodies of work—including his well-known Dango series, friendly and abstract shapes that he has often realized as public sculptures.
¹ Jun Kaneko, “Reflections on the Voulkos Retrospective,” American Craft 39, no. 1 (February 1979): 30.
Sanbon Ashi in ceramic. Made and designed by Jun Kaneko, USA, c. 1970.
30" L x 20" W x 29" H
76.2cm L x 50.8cm W x 73.7cm H
SC876
Collection of Ree and Jun Kaneko