As the Power Station of Art's first major exhibition of 2014, Kazuo Shinohara is a comprehensive retrospective of the major works of late Japanese architect and educator, Kazuo Shinohara, helping to shed light on his ideas and methods. as the first ever Asian Kzuo Shinohara retrospective, we aim to offer artists and architects and intricate, profound and symbolic exploratory experience. drawing on Kazuo's singular design approach - 'negation as a medium for affirmation' - the exhibition invites an examination and skepticism about our own traditions, styles and creations and brings us the full force of Kazuo's 'radical' chaos. This rare exhibition will prove an inspirational experience for art and architecture enthusiasts alike. 

The exhibition will allow viewers to appreciate some of Kazuo Shinohara's more representative works through the mediums of photography, models, voice recordings, videos and documents. Viewers will also have a chance to see exhibits that have never before been shown, including the tools that Kazuo used to design his own home House in Yokohama (1985)  and the original drawings for his Hous in Tateshina Project (2006). The latter project served as mental sustenance for Kazuo in his latter years, by which time illness had rendered him fraught with contradictions. He worked on the building's design for over a decade, producing over 30,000 drawings, but the project was never completed. 

The layer of the exhibition emulates the purism and symbolism that Kazuo was so fond of. Viewers enter through the atrium of the Uncompleted House into an exhibition hall that resembles the abstract shape of a house with no walls, a sort of symbolic theatre. Within this uninterrupted, whitewashed space, viewers tread scale drawings of Hous in White and House in Yokohama underfoot, allowing them to appreciate Kazuo's modus operandi: surveying with his feet and lofting by hand, in order to achieve the correct dimensions. 

Kazuo Shinohara has been a major influence on internationally-recognised Japanese architects including Toyo Ito, Kazunari Sakamoto, Itsuko Hasegawa, Kazuyo Sejima. furthermore, in recent years, sudden international interest in his work led to him being awarded a posthumous Golden Lion Prize at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, an unprecedented move. However, there is no doubt that Kazuo has always been an exceptional figure on the Japanese architecture scene. He leaves us disenchanted with Japanese sales, only to then reconstruct his own semiotic system. He forgot to take the answers to his puzzles with him: those answers still await us exactly where he left them. 

*image (left)
Kazuo Shinohara
Tanikawa House
© Kazuo Shinohara