The Japanese Stamp Drawing Number Three

This last drawing of a stamp rounds out a triptych on that theme. It started with the completion of a drawing with a Taiwanese stamp. I paired it with a Bulgarian stamp to make the drawings in to a diptych. The Japanese stamp from 1969 had been in folio ever since that date in childhood when my father found it on a shipping package and harvested it for his children’s stamp collecting activities. I had written earlier about why I had picked the stamp out for my collection, much to a muted snickering response from my brothers, as the Japanese woman in the stamp had no shirt on. But I saw something special in the stamp so kept it.

Doing some research in to the possible origins of the image, I came across some sites about commemorative stamps produced in Japan in the late 1960's and early 1970's. These featured the works of Japanese artists who had studied abroad in the early part of the twentieth century and learned western style figurative painting and drawing from the nude. Just as in China, Japan had no figurative tradition involving the nude figure, save for erotic art, and even the latter sported figures that were mostly clothed.

So when Japanese artists incorporated the nude or semi-nude figure in to their traditional wood block prints, it was a radical idea. Some of these also experimented with western perspective and foreshortening, as well as richly patterned backgrounds. In most of these, the nude was an aesthetic solitary figure, alone at her mirror or playing with a cat. I never did find the artist who created my stamp of the woman having her long hair combed, but did find a number of Japanese artists working in the 1930's who were making stunning wood block prints in art deco style. One artist, Kobayakawa Kiyoshi, created this lively woodcut print of a dancer in 1932. Smitten by the image, I incorporated this in to my design as well.

There is an amusing little detail in Kobayakawa Kiyoshi’s depiction of the Japanese woman dancing in western costume with high heels. Look carefully at the left foot and you will see that the shoe does not quite fit and her little toe is sticking out.

Links:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/87116574016809130/

http://www.hanga.com/bio.cfm?ID=41

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/arts/design/deco-japan-shaping-art-and-culture-at-japan-society.html

http://library.princeton.edu/news/marquand/2017-01-16/celebrating-japanese-%E2%80%9Ccreative-print%E2%80%9D-1924-1930

https://hyperallergic.com/336964/an-alluring-glimpse-into-japans-embrace-of-art-deco/

Richland County Library Exhibition

Today I delivered my half of the drawings and paintings for our upcoming exhibition, Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek.  The exhibition opens on January 7 at the Richland County Library.  Click on the Exhibitions button at left for more details.
The largest work in the show will be my acrylic and paper collage on canvas, A Dance of Heaven and Earth: From Inside to Outside and from Above to Below.
 In keeping with the bilingual theme, the composition is interspersed with Chinese characters written in various styles, all referring to the title.  The hidden characters are: inside:  内
 outside: 外 outside is written in a style called "grass," which is a lively cursive script.
above: 上 Is written in bold, regular script called "kai"  as is the character for below: 下

 heaven: 天  is written in an ancient form called "seal script," which is somewhat pictographic.

The earth, 土 is even more ancient in form and refers to a shrine to the earth.  Follow the central dancer's gaze downward to see it:

Finally, the dance：舞  This character was originally printed on to the paper from a stone seal that I had carved but the print did not take well and I ended up touching it up a bit with paint.  This is also the ancient form of the character. 

Cat Got Your Tongue Again?

The charcoal and pastel drawing Cat Got Your Tongue?, was begun a few years ago and I thought that it was finished, as it served its purpose at the time. With the approach of my two person exhibition, however, Cat now serves a newly revised linguistic purpose. My two person exhibition with Una Kim, Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek, will be permeated with all kinds of language and cultural ironies.

For this reason, my revised Cat Got Your Tongue? Now incorporates word play. Looking closely at the tongue of the cat you can see a Chinese character. It is the word teng, a verb meaning "to transcrib." Teng happens to sound like "tongue." Hence the cat not only has your tongue, he has your teng, too, and you are literally at a loss for words. The pearl necklace underneath the poor figure whose tongue is being bitten also sports Chinese characters. These are also pronounced teng (remember sounds like "tongue"), but are words for pain. A cat biting your tongue would be painful.

  A last verbal pun is included on the final pearl, which also reads teng, but is the word for "gallop." The Chinese language is known for homophones, with an infinite potential for puns, some of which fortunately sound like English.

The Bulgarian Stamp

The still life with an enlargement of an old Taiwanese stamp seemed to beg for a companion. Perusing my stamp collection from the 1960's, I came across a Bulgarian stamp that incorporated an art deco looking fish. The Latin words on the stamp identify this as a Hake fish, native to the South African coast. Could it have been part of a series of stamps depicting fish from around the world?

This stamp set the stage for everything that now surrounds it in the final composition. The old antique Encyclopedia of Embroidery yielded some designs with fish motifs, which I painstakingly rendered stitch by stitch. A fossil shark’s tooth served as a three dimensional "buckle" to unify all the paper and fibers in the composition. Finally, I transcribed from The Book of Songs, a poem about fish in a quiet pool.

In a final quirky finish, I signed my name in Cyrillic on the stamp, matching the Cyrillic script for Bulgaria.

Still Life with a Stamp of a Painting by Lang Shi Ning

My preparations for my two person exhibition with Una Kim are under way. Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek is shaping up to be a lovely and thought provoking show. Just as the title suggests, the exhibition is about two artists who trained in both Asia and the United States. We both met at Parsons School of Design in 1988, where we completed our graduate education in figurative painting and drawing. But we both had another side of our artistic selves that had previously been nurtured in a very different tradition. Una was an artist in Korea before the U.S. and I had lived in the People’s Republic of China for many years, where I trained in Chinese language and studio art at the Central Academy of Fine Art. East/West art is difficult to reconcile, as the crux of what is considered "right" and "good" in art is fundamentally different.

Through our art work, we acknowledge that which is translatable and that which is not. While engaged in translating an aesthetic, we are also introducing visual commentary on the what has been transformative in the years since leaving formal education behind. This includes confronting the cultural challenge of being an immigrant for Una and confronting a life changing illness for me.

After many years of difficult work, my body has become stronger and more capable of doing the work of writing, creating art work, and most recently, teaching again (albeit ever so slightly). My most recent work reflects that in its shift in focus from the transformed body on to the Translations part of our exhibition. It is still rendered in the black and white of my Kafkaesque drawings, but now plays with language and cross cultural influences. Some of this is subtle, as in my flattened out drawings of postage stamps and textile art. Enjoy here a drawing that includes a stamp with a picture of a painting by Lang Shi Ning, an eighteenth century Italian artist who traveled to China during the Qing dynasty and became a court painter for the emperor.

Cultural Overlay and Word Play

In preparation for the upcoming exhibition, Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek, I am now dividing my art work in to three parts: work that can be modified to suit the newly recognized requirements, work that shall be replaced, and work that cannot be replaced but must be re-purposed to use in a lecture only.

The diptych drawing of two figures, Cultural Overlay with Word Play, is an example of the last category. It won’t be on display but I still hope to use it in a lecture as it ideally suits the theme of the exhibition. The figures were drawn from plaster casts of classical sculptures found in a study collection in a museum. The one on the right has a title that alludes to ancient Greece but the writing is ancient Chinese. The script is written in a style that might have still been in use as inscriptions on bronze vessels in China and in a time that parallels the rise of ancient Greek civilization.

I will not translate everything here so as to leave something for my lecture, but will point out an amusing bit of word play in the three Chinese characters below the figure on the right. Chinese characters often have repeating parts, called radicals. Radicals are generally found on the left of a word, on the top of it, or surrounding it. The three words here all include the radical that means woman. I cannot type this in at present because my new computer does not yet have software downloaded to type in this script, so I’ve written this out on a separate piece of paper. Chinese characters can be compounded as logical aggregates which indicate meaning by a building up of parts. The first character, an, is such an example because it is composed of a woman underneath a roof and means "safety" or "peace." Other times the part does not indicate meaning but only sound. The second and third characters are phonetics, with the "woman" part signifying gender but the second part alluding to sound. Therefore the second word means "nun," with a combination of "woman" and "mud." This is not a disparaging remark about nuns, but rather that the word for nun, ni, "sounds like" the word ni for mud. The third woman is a mother, with the word for woman attached to the word ma, which means horse but is simply pronounced like mama.

The intended pun in this phrase is that an, ni, and ma all strung together spell out anima, a term coined by Carl Gustav Jung to describe the feminine part of the male consciousness.