Kana Tanaka
I am a Japanese-born artist working with glass and light. I began my glass art studies in the Arts & Crafts Department at the National Aichi University of Education in Japan, where I was trained as a glassblower. I became captivated by the unpredictability of molten glass and its relationship with light. This passion led me to pursue an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, where my focus expanded from small-scale glass objects to immersive, site-specific installations.
My early career centered on studio-based work, exhibiting in galleries and collaborating on theater productions in the San Francisco Bay Area. These experiences inspired me to pursue permanent public art projects beyond the Bay Area. I now create site-integrated installations that engage viewers through shifts in light and scale, offering experiences accessible to broad audiences.
Over the past decade, I’ve completed public art installations across California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Connecticut, Utah, and internationally in Japan and Taiwan. Two of my suspended glass installations received Merit Awards in the Healthcare category at the CODAawards in 2021 and 2022. A recent project in Oregon garnered media coverage and was featured in a television series. This year, I just finished installation of a suspended sculpture at the University of Illinois, with additional projects underway.
As someone shaped by both Japanese and American cultures, I recognize how my background informs how I work with space—through decisions shaped by context. I continue to explore how light can transform the way we experience space, time, and each other.
STATEMENT
When light leaves, the visible is obscured. When a position changes, the previous view disappears. When not paying attention, a moment is missed.
As I work with glass, I encounter diverse expressions of visible phenomena. These phenomena are everywhere in our daily lives wherever light interacts with glass—windows, household objects and fixtures. When a sunbeam enters a window, it is often scattered by small prisms. When a car passes by a window at night, the texture of the glass is projected on the wall with traces of the light pattern appearing and then instantaneously disappearing, creating a trigger moment. My interest lies with these so-called trigger moment as they shift awareness within a split second, its image remembered as if suspended in a daydream.
I incorporate light phenomena in my installation pieces. Instead of making simple objects, which the viewer looks at, I create experiences that surround the viewer and affect their senses, directly and broadly. By means of exaggeration, amplification, distortion and division, I seek to generate new perceptions. Viewers become part of the work as they interact with it and observe light. Glass is the net—with which I take the experience of light and share it with others.
My past installations in galleries and theaters have focused primarily on the ephemeral quality of light and the viewer’s changing perceptions. Through these projects, I have become increasingly concerned with the challenge of retaining this element of unpredictability and the uniqueness of the viewer s experience. Creating permanent public artworks allows me to make such experiences available to an unlimited audience for all ages and over time.
In designing public art, I pay close attention to the local context of the environment, to its surrounding architecture, its history and its ambience as well as the community’s needs. I strongly believe that public art must both enhance and become an integral part of the setting.
When seeing reflections of my completed pieces in my audience’s eyes, I feel an inner satisfaction that my artistic communication process was successful.
Kana Tanaka
