Assembly

Assembly registers Kadota's interest in aggregation: where Metal and Play tend toward a single folded element, the title here implies multiple paper components brought into spatial relationship before the camera. Photographed against a neutral ground, such groupings produce overlapping silhouettes whose tonal layering substitutes for the registered colour passes of conventional [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e). The print reads as a study in how discrete units accrue into a composite field — a sculptor's question carried into two dimensions. This logic of constructed-then-flattened form is characteristic of the practice that earned Kadota selection for the 3rd PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale in 2022, an exhibition that consistently frames photography of paper sculpture as a legitimate printmaking lineage. The title also gestures back to Kadota's MFA training at Kyoto City University of Arts, where assembly as a sculptural method — joining, stacking, balancing — is taught as a structural rather than decorative operation. In Assembly, that vocabulary is preserved through the photographic transfer, so the finished print retains the evidence of three-dimensional decisions made before the shutter.