Kazuki Matsushita
Bear’s anus like a X’mas ornament
Kazuki Matsushita’s work begins at a point before words settle into fixed meaning. He is drawn to the structures of letters themselves: their shapes, arrangements, reversals, and fragmentations. Triggered by words encountered in books or everyday life, images unfold almost automatically, and the work emerges from this initial movement. Meaning is not rejected, but treated as one element among others, alongside visual form, rhythm, and spatial arrangement. Through processes such as anagrams, words are dismantled and reassembled, then extended into painting. Matsushita’s paintings operate as continuations of language, where colour, form, brushstrokes, and blank space redefine words in abstract ways. Elements on the canvas unsettle the boundary between reading and seeing, while blank areas operate as spaces in which perception momentarily pauses. An intimate dialogue emerges between private notes and painting, titles and motifs, generating a subtle tension between language and image that remains unresolved inside his work.
Matsushita expands his ongoing interest in the material and spatial aspects of language into a more bodily and environmental register. The title Bear’s anus like a X’mas ornament draws from contemporary conditions in Japan, including the increasing appearance of bears in urban areas and the atmosphere of festivity associated with Christmas. The bear as a concrete and potentially violent presence, the Christmas ornament as a symbol of decorative and harmless celebration, and the anus as a bodily opening are placed side by side without being reduced to metaphor. While the rise in bear populations and the resulting culls reveal unavoidable tensions— between protection and violence, subject and object—Matsushita does not seek to judge these situations. Instead, his focus is on the structures that produce such relationships. Language, for him, is not a tool for exclusion, but a means of shifting distance, perspective, and visibility.
The body is not conceived as a fixed entity, but as a potentiality that becomes concrete only through the mediation of tools—namely, language. Painting emerges as a site where collected words, information, and personal desires are interwoven, and where meaning and form are generated and dismantled simultaneously. Matsushita’s works do not converge toward understanding or consensus; rather, they present a state in which structures remain in motion. The subtle humor embedded in his practice may offer a moment of release— loosening bodies that have become rigidly bound by meaning, correctness, and interpretation.
One day, I came across a newspaper article reporting that bears entering urban areas in Japan has become an increasingly serious issue. The article was discovered among a stack of D1 materials I was editing, deep in a pile of clippings. It described the growing number of bears known as “urban bears, second generation”—individuals who, having been born with little resistance to city environments, move easily into human spaces—as well as the systematic efforts humans have undertaken to deal with them. The behavior of the bears, and the tension that accompanies their presence, felt like an urgent truth—like a pimple reflected in a mirror—gradually tightening each hidden organ within the body. Through the accumulation of such experiences, my own internalized environment was transformed into an unnaturally sharp and lingering light, reflecting again and again on Christmas night—over the course of a week, a month, a year.
1 A simplified code of the Ministry of Defense used when clipping newspapers
- Bear’s anus like a X’mas ornament, matrix men Sees UK solar banana bears anus like a xmas ornament /matrix men sees uk solar banana
- Our nut (deadly little growing), it turned into a dull grey glow our nut deadly little growing / it turned into a dull grey glow
- Us X’mas ornaments smell fishy, mesmerism sax fons (antsy hull) us xmas ornaments smell fishy /mesmerism sax fons antsy hull
- Untitled
- Untitled
Kazuki Matsushita (b. 1992, Tokyo, JP) is an artist based in Tokyo, Japan. Matsushita has previously presented solo exhibitions in, POSTALES, Galerie Gato, Lima, PE (2025); Intoxication view, KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo, JP (2024); No sleeper seats, that’s a mattress, Cherry Hill, Cologne, DE (2024); The Agentur, ECHO, Cologne, DE (2023); Tokio Hotel, galerie tenko presents, Berlin, DE (2023); OBSESSION II, WSCHÓD, Warsaw, PL (2023); Ice like Ice, im labor, Tokyo, JP (2022); X’mas, im labor, Tokyo, JP (2020). Selected group exhibitions include,Onsen Confidential, KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo, JP (2022); ignore your perspective 52 Speculation⇔Real, Kodama Gallery, Tokyo, JP (2019); Group Show, 4649, Tokyo, JP (2018).