Artist: Kosuke Kawahara

Artworks

Kosuke Kawahara, Untitled
Kosuke Kawahara, Loophole
Kosuke Kawahara, Let's Devolve
Kosuke Kawahara, Untitled
Installation View, "Without Innocence" at RAINRAIN
Kosuke Kawahara, Cutting Edges
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Articles & Reviews

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Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery

Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems. 

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Bonesetter: Dislocations, Connections and Synergies

Walking into the space at 86 Bowery, you are greeted by a calm, welcoming exhibition, the walls warmly lit and filled with a wide array of drawings, paintings, and sculptures, featuring works by 24 artists. The exhibition title is Bonesetter, based on the idea of a bonesetter, an individual in many cultures who resets broken bones and dislocations.

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Kosuke Kawahara – Exotic Star at RAINRAIN

photo story

Kosuke Kawahara’s solo show at RAINRAIN represents a multi-faceted approach to materials, exploring what are conventional ways of organizing knowledge? Or, perhaps, how cosmic, biological, and cultural systems intersect? Throughout the paintings, I recognize forms resembling distorted body parts and hinted symbols from astronomy, depicted with oil paint, acrylic, chalk, spray paint, fabric, and wood. When Kawahara’s surfaces manifest their materiality—a patch of exposed woodgrain or a peel of paint revealing found fabric—they suggest the existence of other dimensions and bring me to question the characteristics of processes like reproduction and decay.