'My work is different from so-called painting and from the context of painting history,' Katano declares. Then how is it different? Katano also says, 'Something whose skill is immature must not be taken as painting.' Katano's 'skill' of fitting an enormous amount of information onto a single picture plane with the greatest of ease is in a sense violent, and at the same time extremely intellectual. His ironic expressions and historical events overlap with the ordinary events of daily life and at times, divided into panels like a manga, compose a layered picture plane. As can be seen from Katano's somewhat Expressionist brushwork, the skill he speaks of does not refer to fine brushwork, composition and so on. Katano thinks that such things, on the contrary, evoke a modern Japanese sense of pathos. Katano keeps his distance from the recently conspicuous trend in which only merely detailed expression catches the eye. Of course, Katano himself sometimes uses fine brushwork too, but unlike figurative expression that is merely detailed, it is apparently painted 'reflexively'. What is this 'reflex'... Katano's antithesis to the context of so-called West-centered contemporary art, which stands at the opposite pole to the Japanese, is conceived with a methodology entirely different from easy Japonisme. The 'skill' and 'reflex' that Katano shows are a means of standing up to the overwhelming thing outside called 'painting'. What is the outside? It is the outside beyond Japan, and the outside of Man Katano himself. And it is also that which has made art history itself. To repaint such a history, no, not something so presumptuous: what matters is to bring into relief the 'Japanese' that has certainly been there since the past. Katano says that what matters is not what to paint, but how to paint. Not expressionistically, but as if hacking history: how to expose what is latent, what has been hidden within. Hacker of the History!! Man Katano. Katano has made Japan his home for four years; so that he does not go off again to some country in Europe,,,, please come and see Man Katano's solo exhibition.