Kenichi Inoue

Profile

1958 Born in Oita, Japan.

1982 Graduated from Sokei Academy of Fine Art & Design, majoring in printmaking. Lives and works in Chiba, Japan.

Solo Exhibitions

1984 – 2023

At Gallery HINOKI, Gallery SIACCA, Maki & Tamura Gallery, Gallery Surge and Studio 4F among others in Japan.

Selected Group Exhibitions

1988 & 1989 The Ohya Underground Arts Exhibition

1990 TWO WEEKS IN THE SPRING (Tateyama Coast, Japan) 1991 – 1994  Lake Naguri International Open Air Art Exhibition

2016 – 2025  NAU 21st Century Art Federation Exhibition

(The National Art Center, Tokyo – The NACT, Japan) 2016 ‘Banquet of Eros’ Exhibition (Gallery HINOKI)

2017 ‘Open Solitude’ Exhibition (Gallery HINOKI)

2018 ‘Moderation that Begets Freedom’ Exhibition (Gallery HINOKI) 2021 ‘Dialogue between Books and Art’ Exhibition (Gallery HINOKI) 2022 ‘Looking at Animals’ Exhibition (Gallery HINOKI)

2023 Self-Portrait Exhibition (Gallery HINOKI)

2024 ‘Dialogue between Books and Art’ Exhibition (Gallery HINOKI) 2025 SAN 2025 Exhibition (Gallery Max New York, USA)

Artist statement

Japanese characters and myself

Characters—are the tool invented throughout the long history of humankind to survive in the unforgiving nature. They have served as a means of exchanging information in countless situations: passing down new technologies to future generations, conveying the precise location of enemies to allies, or giving life to myriad stories and creating new forms of entertainment.

I am deeply fascinated by these characters.

My work draws inspiration from the characters—kanji, hiragana, katakana, and more— that are woven into everyday life in Japan.

By deconstructing the ideographic kanji, or distorting the phonetic hiragana and katakana, I seek to blur their original meanings and open up new possibilities and discoveries.

Each character holds meaning on its own, but when two or three are combined, new meanings emerge, and when layered further, they give rise to grand narratives. Traditionally, these stories take the form of books, but I want to explore them through the medium of painting.

Japan has a tradition of emakimono (narrative scroll painting), which combine illustration and text on long scrolls to record tales and historical events.

I aspire to create my own contemporary version of emakimono, expressing it through the language of modern art.

In recent years, I have worked primarily with Japanese cedar. The grain of cedar wood holds within it the essence of traditional Japanese culture.

There is a mysterious allure to wood grain—sometimes evoking kanji, sometimes hiragana, or even suggesting hidden specters within. In Japan, where wooden architecture prevails, flowing wood grain has always been a familiar presence in daily life.

By bringing out the grain of cedar boards, I hope to create new characters and compose a modern storyteller emakimono.