Tokyo-based artist Yoshitoshi Kanemaki has been captivating audiences with his extraordinary wooden sculptures that explore a profound question: What if the entire range of human emotions could be experienced simultaneously within a single face? For years, Kanemaki has been carving delicate, life-size sculptures from wood, each one featuring impressive glitch effects that create multiple distinct facial expressions within one piece.
These remarkable sculptures showcase an incredible emotional range, with viewers able to encounter everything from joy, playfulness, and pride to despair, anxiety, and frustration all within a single artwork. The sculptures recently took center stage at Kanemaki's solo exhibition titled "Insight Prism," which was staged at FUMA Contemporary in Tokyo, where the artist unveiled some of his most ambitious work to date.
The centerpiece of the exhibition shares the same name as the show itself. "Insight Prism" depicts a young girl with outstretched arms, her entire body disrupted into an assortment of pixels through meticulous carving from Japanese nutmeg and katsura wood. Her face appears shattered as if viewed through a crystal, yet she maintains a serene and peaceful expression, almost inviting viewers to take her hand and join her in her fragmented yet harmonious existence.
While this particular piece doesn't capture many different expressions, Kanemaki's exceptional technical prowess shines through in its construction. "Insight Prism" relies upon multiple gridlocked components that are carefully stacked and balanced to achieve the distinctive glitched appearance. This complex construction method is also employed in other works, including "Reflective Prism" from 2024, which similarly showcases a girl with a crystallized face, though this time she wears a hesitant and somewhat shy expression.
Many of Kanemaki's works focus more intensively on what he describes as the kaleidoscope of human emotion. "Ulala Caprice 3rd," for instance, features a pink-haired girl standing confidently with her hands positioned against her hips. However, as viewers move around the sculpture, they discover more subdued expressions, suggesting that beneath apparent happiness, there may always lurk a sense of dissatisfaction, and vice versa.
This type of emotional analysis aligns perfectly with Kanemaki's deep fascination with multi-faced, multi-armed Buddhist statues, which serve as inspiration for his contemporary work. Within Buddhist tradition, no emotion is considered truly static or permanent – feelings can vanish just as easily as they arrived. This ancient philosophy becomes physical reality in Kanemaki's sculptures, each of which visualizes the gradual transition between conflicting feelings and emotional states.
"We all play multiple roles in our daily lives, switching between them as different situations unfold," Kanemaki explained in his artist statement. "'Insight Prism' embodies distorted reflections of the self and intersecting layers of self-consciousness, refracted, decomposed, and reassembled." This artistic philosophy transforms his wooden sculptures into powerful meditations on the complexity of human consciousness and the fluid nature of emotional experience.
The artist's technique involves creating wooden sculptures that appear as if they have been filtered through a digital prism, bearing multiple different faces that seem to shift and change depending on the viewer's perspective. This innovative approach to traditional wood carving creates a unique visual language that speaks to contemporary experiences of identity and emotional multiplicity while drawing from centuries-old spiritual traditions.
