Life-Sized Animals Carved From Single Blocks of Camphor Wood, Inside a Theater That Has Never Shown Sculpture

KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre opened its 11th exhibition this week. It is the first sculpture show ever staged in the building. Atsuhiko Misawa, who has carved life-sized animals from camphor wood since 2000, shares the space with Koji Tanada, who pulls figures of children from single blocks of the same material. Tokyo Art Beat covered it as part of their May 2026 roundup, and the show runs through June 14.

Both sculptors work in what Japanese tradition calls ichiboku-zukuri: the figure is carved from one solid piece of wood, no joining, no addition. Misawa starts with a single camphor log and a chisel, paints the surface in oils, and lets the grain stay legible underneath. Tanada uses the same method on humans, his children sitting in postures that read as half-arrived. The animal or the child was already inside the wood. The carver's job was to remove the rest.

Maybe this is what happens when our hunger for objects that feel alive collides with a 1,400-year-old technique nobody bothered to interrupt. A 3D-printed pet assembles surfaces around a void. A camphor-wood deer is the body of a tree rearranged into a deer. The shift from maximum functionality to maximum well-being keeps pointing back here: to objects we trust because their material is honest about how they came to be. What if the most convincing companion is also the oldest one we still know how to make?