When Katsura Funakoshi started working in wood more than 30 years ago, it was a highly unfashionable artistic material. It didn't have the mercurial properties of paint or video, nor the modern gleam and sheen of steel or other manmade materials.
By working in wood at that time, artists were almost saying that they belonged to, or wished to belong to, an earlier, gentler, more conservative era, where things changed slowly and art was a craft. In a sense, it was an identification with the slow and gradual way that wood grows and ages -- one ring at a time.
But Funakoshi's latest work, "The Sphinx Floats in Forest" -- now on display with five other recent works at the Nishimura Gallery in Nihonbashi -- is a radical departure from his past. It almost seems as if the slowly changing tree of his art has been struck by lightning, creating sharp breaks and shocking new shapes and textures.