At first glance, nothing appears unusual about the weathered steel H-beams or the beaten-up amplifiers and cabinets arranged casually along the venue’s walls. They look like ordinary mass-produced items. But take a closer look, you can see that they are actually painted on canvas. All of them are works of trompe-lʼœil (paintings that fool the eye) skillfully created by Kazu Oshiro.

Paintings are sometimes thought of as “illusions” that create a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane using perspective and chiaroscuro (shading). But, especially in the post-war United States, it was increasingly believed that it was important to remove illusion from paintings and restore the flatness that is inherent to canvas, and many artists created abstract paintings. Oshiro takes up this mantle of the history of painting, and even as he uses the quintessential illusion technique of trompe-lʼœil, he takes objects that ought to be expressed using perspective and shading and instead renders them three-dimensionally in full size. This dislocates them from the “painting” framework, and creates a surface that cannot give birth to illusion.

When we at first recognize these as paintings, we are startled by their completeness as a “work,” but at the same time, we are hit by the question, “why did I only see it as a work when I discovered that it’s a painting?” Oshiro casts doubt on not only the category of “painting,” but also on the conventional criteria establishing something as a “work.”

After graduating from high school, Kaz Oshiro moved to Los Angeles, where he received both a Bachelor of Arts (1998) and then a Master of Fine Arts (2002) from California State University. Oshiro interprets and builds on postwar American art movements including abstract expressionism, pop art, and minimalism in his own way as he explores true nature of “painting” and “art.” He shows his work both inside and outside of the USA, and in 2014 his solo exhibition Chasing Ghosts was mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (USA).

Selected Exhibition

2014

Chasing Ghosts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, USA

Exhibition

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• Photo: ToLoLo studio