Man Behind the Masks

Genre-buster Jun Kaneko flies in the face of convention.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Oct 7, 2009

[ opera/sculpture ]

Takashi Hatakeyama REIGNING MONARCH: Jun Kaneko's costumes and stage designs lend Madama Butterfly a more avant-garde, modern look without eschewing Japanese history.

From the looks of his sculptural presence in Philadelphia, Jun Kaneko is a force to be reckoned with. Installed in September, his colorful, mammoth mask-like works — Dangos, a Japanese term for "rounded form" — adorn the Kimmel Center's Commonwealth Plaza, the courtyard at City Hall and the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Perelman Building. More intimately scaled pieces — equally cogent despite their smaller size — take center stage at Locks Gallery (through Oct. 31), where the Japan-born, Omaha-dwelling sculptor displays stoic ceramics he forged and finished between 1984 and 2006. These stoneware totems — large and small, epic yet tender — are part of the citywide Kaneko celebration "On the Wings of Music: Art, Opera & You."

The féte centers around the East Coast debut of his production of Madama Butterfly with the Opera Co. of Philadelphia. Kaneko's costumes, lighting and stage sets lend Puccini's tale a more avant-garde, modern look than standard Butterfly productions without eschewing Japanese history. The artist's designs embrace his nation's past, cultural and historical, with blood-red suns and origami-like kimonos juxtaposed with an otherwise minimalist stage.

There's power, curvaceous sensuality, grace and fluidity in all that Kaneko does, regardless of the material or concept, regardless of the outlet. "Everything just comes from me," he says. "There is not really a dark reason as to why I did the opera or even the Dangos — whatever triggers my interest, I just go with it." His concern, rather, was how to deal with form, surface and motion as they apply to operatic notions of movement, facial expression and song. He immersed himself in the music of Butterfly, listening to the forlorn Puccini opera three times a day, often in eight-hour stretches.

From the grandeur of his sculptures that speckle the Kimmel to humbler pieces at Locks, Kaneko has a keen sense of his work's fluidity. Though a sculpture doesn't move once it's on display, the artist says, it creates a fluid relationship with the space it occupies. "It's a pretty small relationship, but if the piece is removed, a different relationship occurs," Kaneko says. "In opera, it comes really fast, but the basic [relationship] is the same: You think about the singer, the costume, how they're playing on the stage. Either way — opera or sculpture — you can't be too rigid about any ideas, because the thing itself is not rigid. It keeps changing, moving, every second."

The relationships that exist within the three-dimensionality of theater pushed Kaneko toward what he considers the biggest challenge of his artistic life. "One has to have a more flexible attitude to deal with opera development," says Kaneko. "As a visual artist, I make all of my decisions by myself — I'm completely responsible. Making an opera is a 200-person collaboration."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Madama Butterfly runs Oct. 9-18, $7-$210, Academy of Music, 1420 Locust St., 215-893-1018, operaphila.org.

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