About Kana Kou

For Kana Kou, drawing is an extension of the lived experience of a body in space, and the act allows her to explore the body’s limitations and investigate how movement and gesture are inherently creative acts. Kou’s experiential two- and three-dimensional panoramic landscape drawings play with perspective and scale. To produce her work, she inhabited each landscape and memorized the sensations of her physical exploration, augmenting her visual recollections with bodily memories. Kou was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1975. She received a BFA (2002) from Hiroshima City University and completed residency programs in the United States, Finland, and Japan. After living on Shodoshima (an island in the Seto Inland Sea), Kou moved to Kamakura, Japan, where she lived and worked until her death in 2020.