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What if the entire range of human emotions could be gleaned all at once, within a single face? That question is one that Yoshitoshi Kanemaki seeks to answer through his art. For years, the Tokyo-based artist has carved delicate, life-size sculptures out of wood, each filtered through impressive “glitch” effects that ultimately create several disparate faces. In one sculpture alone, we can encounter everything from glee, playfulness, and pride to despair, anxiety, and frustration.
These sculptures were at the heart of Kanemaki’s recent solo exhibition, Insight Prism, staged at FUMA Contemporary in Tokyo. There, the artist unveiled one of his most ambitious projects to date, meticulously chiseled from Japanese nutmeg and katsura. Sharing the name of the exhibition itself, Insight Prism depicts a young girl with outstretched arms, her entire body disrupted into an assortment of pixels. Her face appears shattered, as if viewed through a crystal, and yet she remains serene and at ease, almost insisting that we grab her hand and join her.
Although this particular piece doesn’t capture many different expressions, Kanemaki’s technical prowess shines through. Insight Prism relies upon multiple gridlocked components, all of which are carefully stacked and balanced to achieve the glitched appearance. Some of his other sculptures are similarly constructed, including Reflective Prism from 2024. As with Insight Prism, Reflective Prism also showcases a girl with a crystalized face, although this time she wears a hesitant, somewhat shy expression.
Many works, however, focus more on the kaleidoscope of emotion. Ulala Caprice 3rd, for instance, features a pink-haired girl standing confidently with her hands against her hips. But moving around the sculpture reveals more subdued expressions, implying that, beneath happiness, there may always be a sense of dissatisfaction—and vice versa.
That kind of analysis may not be far off, given Kanemaki’s fascination with multi-faced, multi-armed Buddhist statues. Within Buddhist tradition, no emotion is truly static, nor is it permanent—it can, in other words, vanish just as easily as it arrived. This philosophy is made physical in Kanemaki’s sculptures, each of which visualizes the gradual transition between conflicting feelings.
“We all play multiple roles in our daily lives, switching between them as different situations unfold,” Kanemaki remarked in his artist statement. “Insight Prism embodies distorted reflections of the self and intersecting layers of self-consciousness, refracted, decomposed, and reassembled.”
To discover more of the artist’s work, check out Yoshitoshi Kanemaki’s Instagram.
For years, Yoshitoshi Kanemaki has created wooden sculptures bearing multiple different faces, as if they’ve been filtered through a prism.
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Inspired by multi-faced, multi-armed Buddhist statues, Kanemaki’s sculptures explore the full range of human emotions and consciousness.
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Yoshitoshi Kanemaki: Instagram
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