Murals

Jun Kaneko’s first Wall resulted from his first public art commission in 1986, when he installed an array of colorfully patterned tiles in the Broadway Station of Detroit’s People Mover transit system. However it was not until a year later, during his residency at the celebrated Arabia ceramic workshop in Finland, that Kaneko’s enthusiasm for tilework fully emerged. The artist, working with new and unfamiliar Finnish materials, produced hundreds of hand made slabs to test various glaze formulas for color and texture. After weeks of tests, he laid all the slabs on the floor and was astonished to realize that the random arrangement of his test slabs was not only interesting, but that rearranging and moving them around created endlessly fascinating effects. This new creative insight became an obsession, and after many hours spent on the composition Kaneko created Arabia Wall, which became a prototype for his tilework process and aesthetic. Today his Walls are a highly regarded aspect of his public commissioned works, and have been installed in a variety of public venues and museums in the United States and abroad.