Kawamura's Shy Nudists

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

Kawamura Gun is a Japanese painter, video maker, musician and an influencer recently seen in GUCCI campaigns.

His art could not exist without humour, cynicism and a splash of sensuality. The urban spaces in Rome, Tokio, NY are the key of his work inspired to comics, graffiti or cartoons.

Shy Nudists

The movement of the Shy Nudists, final frontier of the paradoxical universe of Gun, represents his ironic, playful, erotic vision. In his bewildering landscapes the nudists shyly venture into the everyday panorama, breaking its rules and roles with their nakedness. The nudists are masked because once stripped of their own identity they feel no shame in doing anything. A freedom, otherwise blasphemous, which harks back to tribal rituals played out in childhood games.

The conviviality, the neighbourhood games, the picnics, the city marathons are stripped of their individuality and taken back to a neutral, blank mask where the eyes are missing and the emphasis is on the mouths eating, smiling, laughing, baring their teeth, trying to show their intentions or hiding in silence. Gun’s Shy Nudists are always frantically busy hiding themselves, demonstrating cockiness and ease, provocation and deafening derision, crippling embarrassment and cheekiness.

Likewise Gun himself affirms: "The laughter hides my shyness. There’s a part of me that feels embarrassed, another that confronts things with a bitter laugh’ and also ‘I’m paralysed in reality. Though on one hand I’m embarrassed about what takes shape in my pictures, on the other hand I dare myself to see how far I can push myself to look at the things that are inside me and not explode".