In the 1976 thriller The Inugami Family, the reading of a will is interrupted by the discovery of a headless body in a nearby lake. Then, a figure from the past reappears, hiding his burnt face behind a mask. Spooked by the chain of events that follow, members of the Inugami family start treating their visitor as an outcast – more creature than human being.

Strange beings are a large part of ‘After birth’ (until May 27, 2023), an installation of paintings by the Moscow-born, Brooklyn-based painter Sanya Kantarovsky at the newly opened Taka Ishii Gallery in Kyoto. The painting Rokurokubi (2023) is named after a yokai spirit in Japanese folklore, whose disembodied head floats above its body. In Kantarovsky’s depiction, a rokurokubi is rendered in profile on a canvas that fits neatly into a wooden sliding window frame. As if inhabiting the physical space, the figure seems to look out to the gallery’s courtyard.

Ranging from malevolent to benignly mischievous, yokai embody the tension between the living and the supernatural, as do inugami, a canine spirit known to hide in a person’s home. Kantarovsky seems to conjure a chorus of these apparitions in works like Little Caspar and Littlest Enemy (both 2023). Each oil on canvas painting contains a solitary figure. The former is cast against a turmoil of brush marks, while the latter is shown golem-like, hiding in darkness indoors, save for a shaft of light coming in from a small window. Badgirl (2023), meanwhile, occupies the gallery’s open loft, and bears the image of a dog. The animal appears remorseful, isolated, and unclear of the role it plays, much like the stranger from The Inugami Family.

Domestic interiors – as both a framework and metaphor for the psychological tensions that haunt living spaces – are at the heart of ‘After birth’. ‘I proposed to Taka Ishii Gallery the idea of finding an older Japanese machiya [a traditional wooden townhouse] to use as an exhibition space,’ notes Kantarovsky; the gallery ‘visited a few different locations before homing in on 123 Yada-cho.’ The Yada-cho area of Kyoto dates back to 1637 and derives its name from Yatadera, a temple in the area that burned down in 1467. As Yada town (or Yada-cho) emerged from the fire, the restored wooden building on 123 Yada-cho also transformed. It was a residence before it became a tea house run by a long line of kimono makers, the Sugimoto family, who still own the building. Their historical residence sits across the street and has been designated an important cultural property because of the family’s connection to silk production.

Some of that traditional industry has found a way into Kantarovsky’s work. Since 2018, he has spent a considerable amount of time in Japan, drawn to its historical and architectural traditions. He saw the setting of 123 Yada-cho as a chance to work with centuries-old textile craftsmen, while revisiting motifs in his own work. For instance, Kantarovsky’s ‘Growth’ series (2022–) repeatedly features the figure of a mushroom with a small face lifting itself out of a wetland – sometimes in oil on linen and more often in watercolor on paper. In Growth (2023), Kantarovsky’s fungus appears on a length of Nishijin brocade, woven with gold and silver thread by a collective of artisans from Kyoto’s Nishijin silk factory district. ‘Some of the artisans hold knowledge of textile techniques that have yet to be passed on to the next generation,’ he explains.

But while ‘After birth’ is reverent of the traditions woven into the fabric of the building that hosts his painted apparitions, Kantarovsky employs their essence without being hostage to their legacies. A decorative noren curtain, found at the entrance of Japanese shops to signal business hours, is hung when the gallery is open and taken down when its closed. This one bears a version of the oil on canvas Container (2022) turned on its side, with the original hanging just inside; a white figure contorted against a black void. The painting and its sigil feel restless and evolving: the visualization of what Kantarovsky calls ‘a more fragmented metanarrative’ that defines his practice. ‘The works communicate in a more complicated way,’ he says, which ‘precludes a tidy resolution or linear storyline.’

Just as paintings are scratched, drawn on, and wiped away, so a metanarrative of real and fictional experiences exists behind any story. The exhibition text itself features the folkloric legend of ubume, the ghost of a mother who died during childbirth and haunts the shopkeeper of a candy store, asking to purchase sweets for her newborn. In keeping, a mother and child appear in the oil on linen Ubume (Yoshitoshi) (2023), which hangs above tatami mats in the building’s main living room. Nearby, a child is dragged across the floor by the scruff of its neck in the oil on linen Drag (2023). Such moments of off-kilter affect resonate across ‘After birth’, with paintings that transform humor into something more complicated.

Perhaps the space between the familiar and unknowable that Kantarovsky’s paintings summon is a reflection of the artist’s own experience of moving from one place to another. He immigrated to the US in 1992 amid the USSR’s collapse at the age of 10. This was just after Japan’s postwar economic bubble burst at the end of 1991, when plummeting prices marked the start of what economists referred to as Japan’s ‘lost decade’, creating another kind of haunting. But loss has always been a source of storytelling – and in the dim spaces of Taka Ishii’s Kyoto gallery, the spirits from then and now converge.

Sanya Kantarovsky
‘After birth’
Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto
Until May 27

Sanya Kantarovsky is represented by Modern Art (London), Luhring Augustine (New York), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo, Kyoto, Gunma, Hong Kong), Capitain Petzel (Berlin).

Stuart Munro is a writer based in Tokyo.

Published on April 28, 2023.

Captions for full-bleed images: Installation views of Sanya Kantarovsky’s exhibition ‘After birth’ at Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery.