Asuka Kaneko

Born in Saitama, Japan, based in Kyoto since 2024, I graduated from Tohoku University of Art & Design, Department of Architecture and Environmental Design in 2013.Using architects' drawings and unbuilt architecture as clues, she reinterprets environments she has personally experienced, exploring placehood and its expressive potential.

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Moving, walking repeatedly, gradually allows a place to seep into me. The landscapes I feel through my body in this process are both what lies before my eyes now and fragments woven together from what I've seen before. Sometimes, they take me by the hand to somewhere else, not here. Architects design buildings within various constraints, yet the drawings they create and the unbuilt architecture derived from them seem to depict landscapes liberated from the limitations of reality. Yet, I feel certain those places exist.

How did those architects, creating spaces with the potential for freedom and hope within constraints, see those places? They must have drawn them.

I found myself wanting to see such worlds that never came to be.