中田一志 Kazushi Nakada
— From Material to Humanity, From Memory to the Present —
Born into a family of ceramicists, with both his father and grandfather working as potters, Kazushi Nakada has been surrounded by craft traditions from an early age. His practice initially emerged from an interest in materials and techniques, but gradually expanded into an inquiry into human existence and the complexities of contemporary society.
In the early 1990s, he moved to the United Kingdom and entered a multicultural environment shaped by diverse races, religions, and historical backgrounds. There, “humanity” and “social nature” were experienced not as abstract concepts but as lived realities. Encounters with discrimination, alongside unexpected acts of kindness, formed a lasting awareness of the duality and complexity of human relationships. These experiences became a foundation for his practice, where themes of social injustice, ethics, memory, history, and the tension between the individual and the state began to emerge.
During the late 1990s, while living and working across Europe, he encountered numerous personal historical testimonies that profoundly shaped his perspective. Stories of political upheaval surrounding the 1989 Romanian Revolution and the Pan-European Picnic, as well as accounts of personal loss and long-term searches for missing family members, revealed history as something embodied and lived rather than abstract fact. His work gradually shifted toward a space where individual narratives intersect with broader social and political structures.
From this trajectory emerged White Process 1 to 0 (2013), a project addressing disappearance—of politics, life, and objects—through ritual acts such as painting ruins white. In 2015, he initiated My Archaeology, a long-term project exploring memory, time, and the human condition. By generating episodic memories and burying them as physical objects in nature, the work reflects on forgetting and remembering, loss and preservation, and proposes a coexistence with time.
His practice spans sound, video, ceramics, and photography, resulting in diverse outcomes, from porcelain dumpling installations to video works featuring pink cats. Despite their apparent fragmentation, his works are consistently grounded in social concerns and a sustained inquiry into the human condition. Material and technique function not as ends in themselves, but as tools for expression.
His current practice investigates tensions between memory and history, ethics and systems, and the individual and the collective. Art is understood as a space that reveals invisible conflicts and unheard voices, continually prompting reflection from the viewer.
Nakada’s trajectory suggests a shift from an inherited path as a potter in his hometown toward a broader engagement with the world through art. While art may not function like medicine or religion, it may create conditions for reflection, awareness, and action.