Jun Kaneko

Jun Kaneko
Kaneko in Charlotte, North Carolina on Saturday, January 19th, 2013
Born	July 1942 Nagoya, Japan
Awards	Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London
Website	www.junkaneko.com

Jun Kaneko (金子 潤^?, Kaneko Jun, born 1942) is a Japanese ceramic artist living in Omaha, Nebraska, in the United States. His works in clay explore the effects of repeated abstract surface motifs.

In 1942 he was born in Nagoya, Japan, where he studied painting during his high school years. He came to the United States in 1963 to continue those studies at Chouinard Art Institute when his focus was drawn to sculptural ceramics through his introduction to Fred Marer. He studied with Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, and Jerry Rothman in California during the time now defined as the contemporary ceramics movement.

The following decade, Kaneko taught at various U.S. art schools, including Scripps College, Cranbrook Academy of Art and Rhode Island School of Design.

Kaneko established his third studio in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1990 where he primarily works. He has also created work in several experimental studios including European Ceramic Work Center, Otsuka Omi Ceramic Company, Fabric Workshop, Bullseye Glass Co., and A.S.A.P. He created series of large-scale sculptures from 1982-1983 at his Omaha Project, from 1992-1994 at his Fremont Project in California and currently at his Mission Clay Project in Kansas. He produced a large Dango series of ceramic pieces resembling vases without openings. (Dango means "dumpling" or "closed form" in Japanese.) The Honolulu Museum of Art has four of these dango permanently installed in a courtyard. His prolific roster of diverse work appears in numerous international solo and group exhibitions annually.

Kaneko's technique involves the use of masking tape and colored slips, which he uses to covers free-standing ceramic forms and wall-hung pieces with graphic motifs and markings. He frequently favors the large oval plate as one of his sculptural formats, which serves as a canvas for arrangements of straight, curving, and spiraling lines, creating an interplay of abstract imagery on a three-dimensional surface.