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Kawamura Gun is a painter, a videomaker, and a musician emerging in the International art world. Born in Yaizu, Japan he moved to London to study art. He fell in love with the trans-avantgarde movement and moved to Rome, where he still lives and works. His art could not exist without humor, cynicism, and a splash of sensuality. The urban spaces in Rome, Tokyo, and New York are the key areas of his work, which is inspired by comics, graffiti, and cartoons.
Naked characters are covering their face with gauze bandages where just the mouth comes out, eating ramen or running through the city in a caustic and paradoxical urban setting of contradictory perspectives and angles, sometimes running and eating at the same time. They occupy spaces, change dimensions, move to different angles, look scared or rather excited, are obsessed with food, and by the contemporary cycle of recycling and consumption.
The movement of the Shy Nudists, the final frontier of the paradoxical universe of Gun, represents his ironic, playful, erotic vision. In his bewildering landscapes the nudists shyly venture into the everyday panorama, breaking its rules and roles with their nakedness. The nudists are masked because once stripped of their own identity they feel no shame in doing anything. Freedom, otherwise blasphemous, which harks back to tribal rituals played out in childhood games.
The conviviality, the neighborhood games, the picnics, the city marathons are stripped of their individuality and taken back to a neutral, blank mask where the eyes are missing and the emphasis is on the mouths.
Mouths are eating, smiling, laughing, baring their teeth, trying to show their intentions, or hiding in silence. Gun’s Shy Nudists are always frantically busy hiding, demonstrating cockiness and ease, provocation and deafening derision, crippling embarrassment, and cheekiness.
Likewise Gun himself affirms: ‘The laughter hides my shyness. There’s a part of me that feels embarrassed, another that confronts things with a bitter laugh [..] I’m paralyzed in reality. Though on one hand I’m embarrassed about what takes shape in my pictures, on the other hand I dare myself to see how far I can push myself to look at the things that are inside me and not explode.’