Kyoko's Room: Kaz Oshiro

A person's space, in many ways, is a physical extension of their person, creating an energy of personality through the objects that are present as well as how they are arranged. Kaz Oshiro creates a personality with detailed representations of objects; objects that go beyond being symbolic to create the illusion of function. The items present create a set that captures the different facets of his identity. In Kyoko’s Room, Japanese artist Kaz Oshiro embodies his obsession with physical perfection with thorough recreations of what seem to be commonplace objects.

This room is based on the set design of Eiko Ishioka in Paul Schrader's film on the life of Yukio Mishima. The biopic explores Yukio’s book Kyoko’s House, where the author divides his personality into four characters: a boxer, a painter, an actor, and a businessman. These characters exist in an otherworldly stage steeped in color. They vie to express their individual forms of perfection in beauty. In the world of Mishima, beauty is violent and essential; it is an end in itself.

Kaz creates a room that strives to express himself through visual perfection. He creates an artistic work that moves beyond creating just platonic concepts of form. He creates a perfect version of something as it exists in reality, the authenticity of wear and objects. Peeled stickers, squashed flies, scuffs, and scratches make his paintings beautiful. You can feel the painstaking labor that goes into every mark as a form of devotion to the image.

In the film Mishima, the different aspects of the writer's personality are expressed through different characters. Kaz places amplifiers, kitchen cabinets, or a suitcase as totems that embody the different aspects of his identity. The piece Zero Case is a painting of a classic silver suitcase, something that has been worn on the edges, ubiquitously common at a certain point, but now it is unique. It appears to have been made special and individual by years of travel and incompetence of luggage handlers, but these marks and scratches are all painted. It is like a found object, but it was never found. The suitcase sprang from the life and the intention of the artist into an art piece.

Kyoko’s room calls on the beauty of the worn, manufactured world around us and celebrates the pursuit of perfection in their creator. It honors the work of a man so dedicated to virtue that he would die for it. Then it sets it up as a stage for us to envelop ourselves in, a painting you can traverse as if it were just a room.