After studying painting at Tama Art University, Kawaguchi's diverse oeuvre has included drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video.
After the Chernobyl disaster, the artist has continuously enveloped various objects, such as seeds, plants, soil, or tools, in lead, a material that protects against radiation.
Kawaguchi has also been identified as belonging to the loosely-affiliated Gainen-ha (Conceptual School), alongside Yutaka Matsuzawa, Jiro Takamatsu, Kazuo Okazaki, Saburo Muraoka (with whom he collaborated in 1973),[1] Isamu Wakabayashi, and Aiko Miyawaki.
Certain paintings, especially those executed in black and white, show Kawaguchi's interest in optical illusions, as he arranges patterns and colors to suggest new shapes within the composition.
Art critic Akira Tatehata describes these early paintings as "illusive," arguing that the artist's taste for the conceptual can already be sensed: "His mechanical repetitions of circles, triangles, stripes and other sign units, while light and rhythmical, even humorous, are at the same time quite inorganically austere, decidedly imparting a chill to the pictorial space.
The artist kept and subsequently painted the mold with the imprint of the boy's hand, considering it a "monument taken from the student's life, an experience of human growth and time never seen again.
This series may be understood as an early manifestation of the artist's interest in exploring relationships (kankei), illustrated through the criss-crossing lines of the wires.
In 1967, he created a series of moving works in which a three-dimensional geometric form (a cylinder or a cone) was placed next to a two-dimensional shape (a triangle or a rectangle) in a transparent box.
"[5] Group "i" (グループ〈位〉, guruppu "i") was co-founded by Kawaguchi in Kobe in 1965, alongside eight other young artists: Inoue Haruyuki, Okuda Yoshimi, Takeuchi Hirokuni, Toyohara Yasuo, Nakata Makoto, Mukai Takeshi, Murakami Masami, and Yoshida Tsutomu.
Art critic Yusuke Nakahara stated that Hole "negated the individuality of the members,"[9]: 13 a recurring motivation in the group's body of work.
As many non-tangible phenomena could not be labeled in this manner, this exercise served to demonstrate, in the words of scholar Masachi Osawa, "the impossibility of defining things with language.
"[13] This was especially true of artists associated with Mono-ha, such as Jiro Takamatsu, Noboru Sekine, Suga Kishio, and Lee Ufan, who has called all of his sculptures Relatum since 1972.
For Relation - Heat, presented at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1970, Kawaguchi laid plate casts on the floor and propped lead bars against gallery walls, each of which had been melted to varying degrees.
For this large-scale installation, the artist laid a series of objects—including an electric range, fluorescent light bulbs, and a motor—across the floor, all interconnected by a network of snaking wires.
What may at first appear to be abstract, painterly compositions are in fact metal objects—nails, steel plates or wires—wrapped in paper or cloth and dampened with either rainwater or an alkaline solution.
[3]: 300 In 1983, Kawaguchi wrapped a living potted tree in copper for the work Relation - Spirit (関係 - 気, Kankei - ki).
[3]: 313 As such, the action of enveloping objects in metal, which was originally a means of exploring perception, took on a new and urgent significance in the wake of environmental anxiety.
Yusuke Nakahara has also commented that the artist's act of enveloping seeds and plants in lead suggests "that a situation has arrived in which these things can only be observed indirectly,"[9]: 17 referring to the preciousness of such resources.
[15] The artist's works thus evoke, in the words of art historian Alexandra Munroe, "a sense of organic growth arrested and protected for eternity.