In 2012, he spent one year in Los Angeles, California, on the Overseas Study Program for Emerging Artists which was overseen by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs.
He was fascinated by the dematerialization of the human subjects that appeared as clouds in his images and felt he was “analyzing the world on a molecular level.” Katsuya Ishida, gallery director of MEM in Tokyo, explains that the dematerialization captured through the clouds of human movement latent with the energy and dynamism of the roaring Japanese economy made Kitano feel connected “with everyone in the universe as a whole.” [7] Ishida explains that after the end of the Japanese economic miracle in 1991, Japan was beset by several disasters compounded by economic stagnation.
After the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, Kitano lost his artistic initiative and stopped producing works.
During this time, Kitano traveled several times to Mexico, where he was exposed to the large-scale mural paintings by artists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco that depicted a multitude of people which Kitano lists “figures from the pre-Columbian era, invaders, rapists, living sacrifices, despots, resistance fighters, children, clergymen, prostitutes, con-artists, merchants, farmers,… coexisting in one image.” These murals inspired him to take portraits, which he then superimposed on top of one another to create composite portraits of people from “different races, countries, classes, occupations and religions around the world.” Ishida says that the throughline between the Flow and Fusion series and his later Our Face series is the blurring of individuality, which finds itself as “part of the larger entity of the passage of time” in which he “(explores) the state of human existence in relation to individuality.” [7] Kitano traveled to various locations throughout Asia and photographed people in different localities, such as Istanbul, Turkey; Xinjiang, China; Taipei, Taiwan; Mae Hong Son, Thailand; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Kermanshah, Iran.
She states that Kitano's Our Face series addresses issues of "layering and memory," where through the superimposition of portraits of people, the works arrive "at the erasure of individual identity."
[9] Zohar also compares Kitano's work to the 19th-century genetic research of Sir Francis Galton, who tried to develop a system for categorizing ethnicity through facial features.
In Zohar's analysis Kitano's works exist between these Galton's classification and Burson's criticism, as "evidence of the crowd we have become, and the lost value of the personal portrait in the world flooded by endless visual information.