The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Spring Visual Grant to Kosuke Kawahara for his project Exotic Star. A body of works from the project will be presented in New York in Fall 2023

Kawahara's project Exotic Star addresses the mystic presence of deformed organisms and their surrounding environment through various medium and visual presentation formats, including painting, drawing, sculpture and will be set up as an installation, which may include an onsite drawing project.

Kosuke Kawahara was born in 1980 in Kyoto, Japan, and moved to New York in 2011. Kawahara currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His intuitive/impromptu gesture generates site-relevant imagery through its multi-layered structure. Kawahara’s works speak to notions of growth, decay, modes of communication and perception, spiritualism, interdependent relationships, and human behavior in ever-shifting environmental conditions. The whole process of creating a work from the start to its end is a process of the artist constantly exploring and (re)constructing the alternative space around darkness.

The concept of Exotic Star was branched out from Kawahara's a decade project Into Ultrabalck—exploration of the condition of darkness, which came up in his mind during his previous studio practice at the former Pfizer building in 2018-2020. The occupied atmosphere of the building reminded Kawahara of animal experimentation and gene-editing as a new technology in pharmaceutical industries. Simultaneously, Japan's nuclear accident in 2011 that the artist experienced was provoked since various deformities were reported after the power plant explosion.

Exotic Star will display how we can read such cryptic meanings of strange phenomena in our bodily/physical realm. As if approaching unknowable, ambiguous borders and never-ending questions may arise to contemplate the current.

Kawahara earned his BFA in Design from Okayama Prefectural University, and graduated with an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2020. He has exhibited at RAINRAIN, Brian Leo Projects, Smack Mellon, Kunstraum LLC, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Trestle Gallery, Paradise Palace, Susan Eley Fine Art, Super Dutchess Gallery. He has been awarded the 2021 City Artist Corps Grants, and First Prize in Works on Paper at The Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts & Sciences in 2021. He completed an artist residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Governors Island Residency Initiative, and is currently a member artist at the EFA Studio Program.

Please visit Kawahara's website and his Instagram for more information.