Collaboration with Ana Citrin

While teaching at Cranbrook Academy of Art as Head of the Ceramics department, Jun Kaneko was pondering a crucial determination that all artists must consider: completion. More specifically, he wondered: How does one know when a work or a design is finished?  Kaneko relies on his intuition, yet he contemplated what would happen if he relinquished control over when to stop and when to continue.

This query resulted in an unlikely collaboration with the young daughter of a colleague at Cranbrook. The little girl, aged three, was named Ana, and Kaneko gave Ana the power to decide when their jointly created compositions were complete. Ana came to Jun’s studio every weekend, and together they created drawings, a stack of fresh Fabriano Artistico cotton paper at the ready. He recalls, “I made a rule. When she said, ‘new paper,’ no matter what, I had to stop and change the paper. We did that for two-and-a-half years, every Saturday. At one point a drawing might look really good to me, so I would try to trick her into saying, ‘new paper,’ but she wouldn’t say it. She kept on working on it, and I started seeing how it was changing. Then it became much better than at the point when I thought we should be finished. That’s when I had an opportunity to see beyond the finishing point.”