kozyndan

“Life In the Liminal Space Between Fuji-san and Yatsugatake”

A limited edition of 600 signed and numbered offset posters on a satin coated cover stock paper measuring 99x23cm (39 x 9 inches). Released in 2025.

Our 31st Panoramic artwork release (and our first new image inthe series in 12 years!) is the first to be set in Kofu, the prefectural capital city of kozy’s home prefecture, Yamanashi.

It is a nostalgic love letter to a bygone era (literally in this case, as the locally famous building in the panoramic that housed the department store Okajima was demolished while we were creating this a!rtwork!) as well as humorous roll call of characters (cartoon and historical alike) with origins in Yamanashi, as well a chance to make fantastical versions of some of our friends here.

A tomato vending machine backpack? Kozy forcing Dan to dress in Sailor Moon cosplay? Pigeon tengu? A six armed farmer woman? Giant dogs ridden by samurai and a massive grape mascot? A rabbit lighting a tanuki on fire? What does it all mean!??? I guess that is up for you, your family, and your friends to discuss!

Get one here for $45!

“The Cutest Infestation”
Pencil on Paper, 8 x 11 inches, 2025

I suppose it’s part of our lore that we had two rabbits back when we were still in college living in our first apartment together. Those #bunnies were our first models and thus quickly became a part of our art. Our first show at Giant Robot Store features several paintings of rabbits; I had taken to making lots of drawings of bunnies and kozy made paintings of some of them for that first exhibition as well as the NYC bunny infestation panoramic. To be honest, we never had a specific adoration of rabbits (beyond being animal lovers in general - we were always more cat people), but rabbits became something I would just doodle absent mindedly - they are the only subjects I can draw well enough to not be stressed about trying to get right, and I only ever can feel meditative and in the flow if I am drawing them. This is probably the only reason rabbits featured so heavily in our artwork over the years, and why I made the bunny wave artwork for the cover of Giant Robot Magazine back then.

Anyhow - given all this kozy thought it made sense to do a new bunny infestation for this series of drawings she was making and she did a really cute one!

These days the only time we see rabbits is when we go to this one cafe in our town that has rabbits just kind of hanging out in the dining room. Sometimes they run right by our feet - it’s so cute! They also have goats, and yep, some cats too, thankfully!

This original, framed drawing is available HERE!

We have a new exhibition entitled “Memory Lane” opening this weekend at Giant Robot’s GR2 Gallery in LA! Opening is Saturday April 19, 2025, 6:00 PM-9:00 PM PT, and the show is on view until May 6, 2025. Location: GR2 Gallery 2062 Sawtelle BIvd LA, CA 90025

It’s been a strange journey. With everything that has happened in the world since we started our career together almost a quarter century ago, and especially in the last five years, this past winter had us feeling a bit reflective and outright nostalgic for those simpler times when we first started working as kozyndan. The era before social media existed, the time before so much of our life revolved around our phones, when the threat of AI was still a science-fiction concept, before we had all experienced our first worldwide pandemic, when the US still pretended not to be racist at its core, and before billionaires had fully initiated their plan to create a Fascistic oligarchy there.

We started pouring through that work that launched our career when we were discovered by Giant Robot’s Eric Nakamura - those early panoramics and that style that we employed for our first book Urban Myths, that Giant Robot published. We have largely moved on from that specific aesthetic, and haven’t made a new panoramic in 12 years, but this mood of nostalgia had kozy itching to attempt a new one. We moved back to Kozy’s home prefecture of Yamanashi at the start of the panoramic so she could reconnect with her family and her home and her culture, so she wanted to take this opportunity to employ this “panoramic style” to highlight her Prefectural capital city, Kofu, and cultural icons (famous and not so famous) that hail from Yamanashi. In the past we have mainly done panoramic images set in the middle of big internationally famous cities (Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, etc), but she wanted to give her home the same kind of treatment (even if it perhaps would have a more limited audience since few people outside of Yamanashi would care about Kofu). To most viewers the characters in the panoramic will be unknown - its hard to say which are wholly made up by us, and which are referencing local mascots, or local myths - although if one looks closely enough they will discover that some VERY famous characters origins have ties to Yamanashi!

Being a child in the 80’s in Japan, Showa era nostalgia runs deep in kozy (and indeed is becoming a huge trend in Japan in general these days), so we’ve casually documented Showa era storefronts and buildings that remain around Yamanashi and elsewhere in Japan for years. These reminders of a simpler time (and a more prosperous time perhaps) of her childhood made for perfect settings for the characters we created to inhabit them. It’s been a long time, but it was great to get back into that mode of looking at a real place and then concocting characters and stories to hide or center in that space, just like we were doing at the beginning of the century. Pulling from nature, fairy tales, pop culture, our real life friends, or just figments of our imagination, we transform the real life city scene kozy is drawing, or use the place as a backdrop for narratives that make us smile. I think this style of our early work was always about that - making us and our friends smile. That seems to be something we need a lot of these days.

“Minka-Ski Space”

Edition: 50 prints, signed and numbered
Fine Art Matte Paper
41 x 65 cm (16 x 26 inch) paper size with a 33.4 x 57 cm (13 x 22.4 inch) image area.
$150US

This print is of our most recent kakejiku nihonga painting and was inspired by the old wood timber frame joinery in our 140 year old farmhouse in the Japanese countryside, as well our young cats, who figured out they could ascend the columns like a tree trunk and have a whole new world to explore in the rafters over our heads. Like many of our cat paintings, almost all the cats are ours, or our friends’ cats. The cats are not, however, existing in one dimension, but we seem to be seeing multiple dimensions of cats and joinery in the same moment. It may seem to make sense to our perception and then not and back again - they appear to have their own kind of logic!

(Check out the process of making the original painting HERE)

"Minka-Ski Space" Limited Edition Archival Print | Kozyndan

Limited Edition Archival print on matte fine art paper based on a painting we exhibited in Melbourne in September 2024. Signed and numbered

Kozyndan

https://nahcotta.com/collections/kozy-kitchens/products/minty-kozy-kitchens

Kozy has a new collection of her bunny primitive sculptures on view now Nahcotta in New Hampshire. All 55 sculptures available for purchase NOW exclusively through their online store, so go have a look! So many cute ones to choose from (and Nahcotta lists each character’s story on their listing) - they make perfect gifts for the Holiday Season!

Check them out!

Kozy Kitchens

Kozy Kitchens is a visual artist from Japan, living in Los Angeles over half her life now. Making with clay is a purely joyful experience fo

Nahcotta

"Ko-Minka-ski Space" nihonga scroll painting of cats on Escher-esque Japanese wood joinery

“Minka-ski Space”
30x51cm painting (42.5 x133cm scroll)
nihonga paint on washi paper, fabric scroll
2024

Edit: SOLD

Our first kakejiku in over 3 years, this traditional nihonga (Japanese mineral pigment paint) artwork was inspired by the old joinery in our 140 year old farmhouse in the Japanese countryside, and our young cats who figured out they could ascend the columns like a tree trunk and have a whole new world to explore in the rafters over our heads. Like many of our cat paintings, almost all the cats are ours, or friends’ cats. The cats are not, however, existing in one dimension, but we seem to be seeing multiple dimensions of cats and joinery in the same moment and thus it may seem to make sense to our perception and then lose sense and back again - they seem to have their own kind of logic.

Kozy painted this artwork using the very traditional medium of Japanese painting - crushing minerals into a fine powder herself and mixing them into warmed hide glue to make each color, repeatedly re-warming the mixture to keep it at the correct temperature necessary to paint it onto the handmade washi paper.

Once the painting was finished, we took it to a father and son scroll making team in the mountains of Minobu, Yamanashi, where we selected the elements of fabric they would use to build the scroll around the painting (one might assume a painting is attached to the front of a scroll, but in fact the fabric elements are cut and glued to fit around the painting instead).

We have sent this painting off to Outré Gallery in Melbourne, Australia for their 2024 Vanguard group exhibition, which is on view September 6 - 29, 2024.

“The Munchies”
12 x 12 inches (30x30cm)
acrylic gouache on board
2024

Edit: This painting is now SOLD (we do have prints available though!)

This painting is a companion piece to “Strength In Numbers” painting we did last year for the year of the rabbit. Dan is thinking of this as perhaps a twelve year cycle, one painting per year, in which the new year’s animal is somehow overtaking the previous year. For the year of the dragon it seems a bit lopsided - a dragon could easily take out a rabbit (except maybe that one killer rabbit rom Monty Python and the Holy Grail - hah!), so he wanted to make it a bit lighthearted while still having a dragon devour bunnies. The previous painting had bunnies made of snow, so it made good sense to have cloud bunnies this time around. It feels like the dragon is enjoying some nice cotton candy, or slurping down some chewy boba and quite enjoying it!

We originally created this image to celebrate the Lunar New Year for the Year of the Dragon back in January, but kozy was quite busy preparing for a ceramics exhibition and didn’t get to finish this painted version of dan’s dragon illustration until July! She had a lot of fun with it though - she is a bit obsessed with this little USB mini airbrush she bought - she has never used one until last year, but kind of loves how different the effect is with acrylic gouache (her medium of choice for the last 20 years) than her usual brush technique.

Usually we are only making paintings specifically for some exhibition we have committed to, but this painting we just made to continue this cycle of paintings we have envisioned, so this painting is actually available at the moment. If you are interested, please email us!

We have also released an archival print of this artwork - check it out in our web shop!

“Life Is Puzzling”

Offset Poster Print on 80lb Cover Stock, 30 x 10 inches (768x251mm), Signed

We are all just pieces in this infinite piece puzzle of the grand Universe!

We were recently reprinting some of our long-running popular posters and our printer here in Yamanashi said their was extra space on the large sheets they were using for the print job we decided to make use of it to make some new posters, including this one. This Panoramic artwork is based on a Paris street corner.

We originally created this artwork for a jigsaw puzzle released by German puzzle company, but it is long since sold out, so we decided to release it as a poster for the first time more than 16 years after we first drew and colored this unusual edition to our Panoramic series.

Available now! Purchase one HERE!

Kozy really likes this particular handmade washi paper she finds in her hometown, where paper has been made for nearly 1000 years. Each one with different pools of pastel color, and speckled with gold flecks that shimmer in the light.

After a long stretch this year of being focused on things besides painting (ceramics, ceramics exhibitions, learning to adult in Japan, farming, trying to figure out how to transition our business to being technically based here in Japan, etc), she set down to get back into painting mode to create some artworks for an exhibition at Giant Robot’s GR2 Gallery in Los Angeles called “Circles” that is on view now (and pretty great actually! So many talented artists, as is the norm for Giant Robot shows).

She based the paintings on a drawing of a massive school of #bunnyfish Dan made many years ago (it reminded us of our days living in a little 2 bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, CA😌 the waves of nostalgia when revisiting old artworks is intense!).

If you can’t get to the show in person, the artworks are available here:

GR2: Circles - Group Exhibition

Check it out!

Kozy’s new exhibition of her bunny primitive ceramics is opening TONIGHT, May 6th, 2023 at Nucleus Portland in Portland, OR, USA! “Out of the Ashes” presents 90 new handmade ceramic sculptures, fired in the traditional wood fired kilns in the countryside near our home in Yamanashi, Japan.

Kozy has been creating these small character figures for a decade now. Each figure acts as a personal idol or totem of sorts, imbued by kozy and dan with its own name and story, that reflect our own world and lives. If you come to see the exhibition and read their stories - one of them may call out to you for one reason or another!

The opening runs from 4-6PM at Nucleus Portland on Alberta (in the Alberta Arts district, 2916 NE Alberta St #BPortland, OR 97211) on May 6th and kozy (and dan) will be in attendance - so if you are in the area, come down and say “Hi!”

The exhibition runs till May 28th.

For those who are far far from Portland, sculptures are available for purchase online here: https://nucleusportland.com/collections/kozy2023