Katsuya Murano has gotten around in this world and in his work relations constitute between him, the things and the people. His demonstrations, drawings and installations let the audience take part with these processes which is why this exhibition in the EINSTELLUNGSRAUM guides to different cultures and times.

Whilst installing this exhibition I was sitting across a knowledgeable conversational partner one afternoon. He had taken along something from his travels and did not just reproduce what one can see and read in travel brochures anyhow. I say this although he represented the outline of a westwork of a cathedral - like the invitation card shows. But frankly - who knows the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels? What appears first as a conventional image one only sees rarely nowadays;  at least then when - like Murano says - this  drawing of an historical building was produced with pen by one's own hand. After a sketch on site he drew a fair copy  in the atelier. Here he keeps the blue of the pen which in this country stands for a quick sketch and note , but can also hint to blue-line print.

Today drawing is a rarely performed allegedly slower fashion to acquire a building. However it is to be doubted if a procedure that makes it possible to effectively engrave in one's mind a building by eye and hand can become obsolete even though lengthily there have been phopographic possibilities of instant exposure and measuring of buildings. Instead of analyzing a heap full of photographs Murano made accessible to himself this building as well as its architectural circumstances manually and intellectually systematically on site what at the same time means that one acquires the proportions and the order of the windows, cornices, doors and consoles. Doing so one eventually can learn their functions and terms. An approach like that reverses a cliche spread amongst Europeans to make fun of about travelling Japanese with video and photography equipments before this touristic behaviour had generally become accepted by mass spreading of digital gadgets, and often peaks by filming and photographing at every turn. At least each such an approach is an attempt to

acquire externally something unknown, in order to get to know and understand it. Mostly it is also a question of the available time that co-decides which equipment one chooses in order to adopt the foreign. How else could one deepen a fleeing moment as a traveller; because even the longest holidays and even research residence ends eventually.

In any case in this drawing we see a result of what mostly is held back from us when we watch travellers that are drawing or taking photographs. After all almost always we miss the results that are captured by various means. Possibly we'll only get to see them in exceptional cases but still we assume from the start that everything was stereotype. The particular connections between images of travellers and their individual ambitions  present themselves  outside the commonly used travel literature only rarely for us to see so that it is a special experience to be able to see here the condensates of the residencies abroad and travels of a young Japanese artist who was born in Mexico, raised in Japan and studied art in Hamburg. He brought his inter-cultural experiences to an artistic form that hardly considers travel literature and that is taken on as a task - if at all - only by scientific literature and inter-cultural research.   

II.The range of human actions.
In the installation hanging from the ceiling we see the three-dimensional summarization of the studies Murano undertook of Asian and European subjects. Four models measuring about 160cm flanked by crystal structures can be spotted, of which two each represent a pagoda and the both others each a steeple. The pagodas are replikas of the pagoda of the Six Harmonies Pagoda in Hangzhou, China and the To-i in Kioto, Japan. The steeples replicate the one of the parish church on the island Murano¹ in the laguna of Venice and the one of the aforementioned cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels. Like he explained also in his diploma thesis at the HFBK Hamburg² (academy for visual arts) in viewing such buildings he is interested in how people compensate culturally overlapping their fear of dying and their powerlessness in the face of daily problems. Murano gives good reasons as to why people create something that surmounts them in order to enlarge their diminutiveness. Doing that they gather and take deprivation and efforts onto them. The cultural-historical implications which are characteristic for Murano's works also reach into dimensions that exceed historical time horizons and by that enable to view human actions from a larger distance.