Lois Hirshberg

Jun Kaneko is known for his monumental ceramic sculptures in the form of heads with expressionless faces or boldly colored, ovoid, vertical, sculptural forms called dangos (dumplings in Japanese). These enormous forms are a testament to Kaneko's skills in handling stoneware on a colossal scale. In addition to the heads and dangos Kaneko has created a number of tile murals, rectangular wall plaques, and large ovoid platter forms. He has also worked with glass, bronze, and fiber, has designed sets and costumes for opera, and is an accomplished draftsman and painter.

Kaneko came to the United States from Japan in 1963 at the age of twenty-one. The following year he enrolled at Chouinard Institute of Art where he studied with Ralph Bacerra and worked in the Los Angeles studio of Jerry Rothman. In 1964, Kaneko entered the University of California, Berkeley studying with Peter Voulkos. In 1970 Kaneko entered Claremont Graduate School where he studied with Paul Soldner.

In 1982, Kaneko, then Head of the Ceramics Department, Cranbrook Academy, was invited for a special commission at the Omaha Brickworks and to take advantage of their thirty-five-foot diameter beehive kiln. Here he set out to make his first four dangos; oval-shaped, seven feet long and six feet high. The complex construction consisted of the domes and three thick quadrilateral slabs. The largest project completed on site, the dangos took six weeks to construct, three months to dry and over thirty-five days to fire. Kaneko painted the forms with brightly colored slips in decorative geometric patterns and stripes. When completed in 1983, these sculptures were first displayed at the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, Missouri, and were later moved.

An interview with Jun Kaneko conducted May 23 and 24, 2005 by Mary McInnes, for the Archives of American Art's Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America is available at:http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-jun-kaneko-12628.