Metal

Metal sits within Kadota's expanded-printmaking practice, in which folded paper is photographed under directional light and the resulting image is itself treated as a print surface. The title points to the metallic register Kadota cultivates through tonal compression: high-contrast greys read as cold sheet rather than as the washi or coated stock from which the source object is constructed. Where traditional nishiki-e relies on the baren to drive pigment into fibre, Kadota substitutes the camera and the print lab, retaining the multi-pass logic of relief printing while replacing the woodblock with a folded armature. The work reflects the sculptural training he received at Musashino Art University and Kyoto City University of Arts, where modelling and casting vocabularies inform a flat output. Selected in 2022 for the 3rd PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale, Metal exemplifies the curatorial argument that print can be defined by indexical transfer rather than by ink and matrix, situating Kadota alongside contemporaries who treat photography as a printmaking medium in its own right.