TN664, 2015

Hachiro Kanno  

After the Fine Arts of Musashino (Tokyo) where he discovered the Western artistic movements, the young Hachiro Kanno arrived in Paris in 1968 as a scholarship holder and continued his studies at the Beaux-Arts. In 1979, he was given the studio where Picasso lived between 1904 and 1909 and settled "with intense emotion" in the legendary Bateau Lavoir of Montmartre that, moreover, he will never leave.

Since a young age, he was immersed in the art and values of Zen culture (meditation and creation) in the first place thanks to his father, a Shintoist and renowned calligrapher in Japan, who taught him to hold a brush, to position his body, and to his older brother who introduced him to the art of the trait and the correctness of proportions. He also taught him the rigour, personal discipline and integrity that any practice of calligraphy implies .

The school, then other courses will bring him a different knowledge, but this time critical. It will push him to prefer personal experience to discover his own artist specificity, his freedom to think and act outside molds and influences.

The recurring themes in all his works (the full and the empty, the shadow and the light, the seizure of the moment in its continuity, the incessant transformation of the forms, the alliance of temporal and eternal .. .) reflect his oriental conception of art and life in general.

A calligrapher and a painter, Hachiro Kanno multiplies exhibitions and artistic events between France, Japan and the United States.