Mr. Koji Kakinuma was born in rural Tochigi Prefecture, Japan in 1970. The youngest of three children, he learned from his parents - both of whom were physical education teachers in nearby public schools - the abiding love for nature, art, and physical pursuits that characterize his art even today.
Kakinuma’s father, in addition to training national champion marathoners, was also an avid practitioner of classical Japanese monochromatic brushwork. Koji recalls one of his earliest memories to be the rich scent of India ink that always seemed to permeate his childhood home and one of his most profound influences to be his father’s decision to leave a comfortable teaching job and enter the art world as a professional artist at the age of forty.
Kakinuma’s first lessons in brushwork came when he was five years old. Even at that early age, his single-minded concentration and meticulous, quiet nature set him apart from other young students. Early on, he followed the path of countless generations of artists before him, first learning the basic techniques of his medium, then studying and attempting to reproduce the works of past masters. As he grew older and more technically adept, it was no longer enough to copy the externalities of past masterworks and he began to attempt to breathe life into his reproductions. The first step was to understand and emulate the subtle movements of the brush the masters would have made as they executed their work; the second was to internalize these subtle strokes and match even how the past masters would have breathed as they painted; the final step was to abandon the process of copying altogether and express his own vision through the voice of another, almost like an actor on a stage.
In high school, Kakinuma began studying monochromatic brushwork with one of the three gods of Japanese brush art in the modern era - Mr. Yuhkei Teshima. The aged Teshima, a charismatic artist who had been shunned in conservative pre-War Japan for his eccentricities until his work was selected to represent the best of Japanese art at numerous international festivals, affectionately called the young Kakinuma “Pee-wee,” perhaps partly as a way to rein in the young artist’s rapidly developing precocity. Kakinuma was to be the last of Teshima’s stable of famous students and before Teshima died in 1986 he told Kakinuma “If you keep going with this, Pee-wee, you are going to someday be a much greater artist than me.”
Upon Teshima’s death, Kakinuma entered the prestigious Tokyo University of Arts and Letters and began studying with another of Teshima’s former students and a giant of Japanese monochromatic art in his own right - Mr. Ichijo Uematsu. It was in his university years that Kakinuma’s brilliance started to be recognized throughout the Japanese art world as his works began to win awards in national competitions. In 1990, at the age of 20, he became the youngest winner in the history of the prestigious Dokuritsu Shojindan Foundation prize.
Upon graduating from college with top honors, he followed his parents’ example and became a teacher. After three years, though, the pull was too strong and he set out to follow his muse into the world of art.
This gamble was soon to pay off as he won the coveted Mainichi Prize in 1995 for his work The Force of Icarus and was thrust into the spotlight as one of Japan’s leading monochromatic brushwork artists. In 1999, he again won the Mainichi Prize, hereby solidifying his position as the brightest rising star amongst his contemporaries.
It was during this time that Kakinuma truly started to express himself through what he calls the Eternal Now (Japanese: Ikkai-sei). The Eternal Now represents a one-shot, winner-take-all sensibility that permits no uncertainty and no hesitation, and allows no regrets and no revision. It is the quintessential expression of Japanese art - bringing together the years of tedious, repetitive study of technique and theory with the dynamism of the psycho-spiritual energy manifesting itself at a specific instant in time. The union of the strictures of Japanese tradition and the freedom of unrestrained artistic expression brings to life works of profound energy, power, and originality.
Among the works that Koji finds the most conducive to self-expression through the Eternal Now are monumental works - single pieces measuring tens or hundreds of times larger than conventional works of monochromatic brush art. In Kakinuma’s own words, “Painting a work that is many times larger than the human executing it naturally exceeds the artist’s ability to conceptualize the work and forces him into the mercy of the Eternal Now.” These works require enormous amounts of physical strength and stamina as well as an extraordinary sensitivity to the conditions in which the pieces are being executed.
Another of Kakinuma’s innovations is what he calls Trancework. Pieces executed in this style are countless repetitions of simple, powerful phrases ? an artistic mantra of sorts ? executed while Kakinuma weaves his way into a deeper and deeper trance.
It is no wonder that Kakinuma, whose daily regimen alternates painting with long-distance running, is known in Japan as “The Warrior Artist” who, like the stylized knights of Japan’s feudal past, balances the physical with the spiritual in his works and in his life.
His executions of massively large pieces along with his frequent collaborations with musical groups in performance art demonstrations have caught the eye of traditional and modern artists alike and his popularity in Japan has reached cult status. Since 2000, he has been featured in two separate televised documentaries, Top Runner and The Passionate Land and he was invited to execute a performance piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit The Written Image. In 2006, he was invited by Princeton University to become a visiting researcher in the Department or Visual and Performing Arts and presently resides in Princeton, New Jersey. Most recently, he was commissioned to execute the title artwork(The Warrior Ideal) for the 2007 season of Japan’s most popular serialized television drama series Taiga Drama which details the life of the medieval Japanese warlord, Takeda Shingen.