young girl with a mask

A young girl wears or holds a traditional Japanese festival mask — perhaps the smiling white face of an okame, or the fierce features of an oni — creating a disjunction between the child's small face and the exaggerated mask she presents to the world. Kawano used the mask subject to explore questions of identity, play, and the relationship between surface appearance and interior self that preoccupied him in his more abstract figurative work. The image is simultaneously charming and slightly unsettling.