Five questions from Lauren Spencer King for Hirofumi Suda, and Five questions from Hirofumi Suda for Lauren Spencer King regarding their joint exhibition.
1.
LSK
What do you imagine is inside the center of your spiral curtain?
HS
Where I grew up, near my home town on an island of Japan, there is a beach called Sai-no-Kawara where the local people believe in a myth that connects it to Limbo, the netherworld (http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/sai-no-kawara.html.) One day as a teenager, I went swimming near Sai-no-Kawara, diving with a snorkel. And I dived quite deep and got really dark and cold. But I was never able to get to the bottom — I could not hold my breath any longer. I got freaked out, but was very focused and remained calm. When I tried to swim up, I was imaging or seeing myself as so small in a vast timelessness. I don’t know what that feeling is in between fear of death as a human or/and becoming a part of life cycle, like any plankton or sea creature. Now I am looking back to this experience in relation to the local myth and I am not sure if this was really my memory. So I would not like to have any pre-assumption or thoughts inside the curtain but personally it always triggers that moment. But my concern is that closed isolation and disconnection actually make it possible to feel or listen carefully. As a result, maybe we are open to alternative perception and connect to others.
2.
LSK
What is your relationship with the color black, or darkness as a medium, color, feeling, concept?
HS
There was no particular reason why I used black ink but it was very reasonable to keep it in practice during my research. I learned calligraphy for six years at a buddhist temple and after that I kept practicing from the mid to high school in Japan. And I took figurative drawing class using ink at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was ambitiously experimenting with different sizes, methods and media, acrylic color paintings, non-liner video with scenes collected from a compact camera. And I experienced different levels of failure when the idea got bigger than what I could do and at the end I came back to use ink drawing at reasonable sizes again. One of my tutors at the Glasgow School of Art during my MFA gave me advice: “why can’t you make something with what you already have?” And I listened to him very carefully. And I started to think with what ink links or dis-links to other words and image such as wink, blink, think, sink… Not just a word play but I mean, of course, there is the heavy history of masters practice and its liquidity in squid ink / ash water, grayness from ancient practice in text writing or figurative drawing as the medium. However, as a result, what I owe to this inking is not only how conventionally impossible to control it is, like a stain oozing, but it also made me think how light the medium ink is. Lightness doesn’t mean necessarily optimistic for me but spontaneous to what is occasionally appearing each moment including coincidence and clumsy mistakes. And I noticed darkness in ink is not absolute darkness. I mean complete darkness or brightness is already the idea and might exist like ‘dark matter’ but being perfect black or white is nearly impossible. Some artists deal with it but I would like to avoid it. And I had to face this grayness floating in between darkness and brightness, so it is becoming this question again.
3.
LSK
Do you think there is a connection between dreaming and your work, or the way you make your work? What kinds of things do you dream about?
HS
You mean dreaming during sleeping, day dreaming or dreaming like utopia? Yes there is a connection, but I am not sure if this is my dream or someone else’s dream. Following on from the famous skepticism on a butterfly’s dream from Zhuang Zhou in 4th century BC, to many recent meta-fictions, I would like to be aware of facing the nightmare in reality or while dreaming. But I don’t know which one is which to be honest. When we are dead asleep we must be dreaming, but when we wake up we often don’t remember what we dreamt. Sometimes we remember, but it’s usually a mix of old and new memories and it becomes really odd. The word dream sounds quite colorful and mad, like when we blink our eyes and then still there is an after-image…
4.
LSK
When you draw what do you think about?
HS
When I am researching and organizing, I often feel like throwing myself into a maze or a fictional city; walking, wandering, getting lost. I create the pattern structure of a maze, but am not sure that is the actual structure. So I try not to think too much during drawing but become very focused not on the appearance of patterns of forms, but the moment when they start deforming, but not completely becoming abstract. And I put them together like puzzle or mapping on the floor or table. I am avoiding black or white symmetry, but accept grayness, or try to make it oblique through different juxtapositions, while always wondering what they are.
5.
LSK
Tell me about your binders… How do you put them together? How do you think about them in relationship to your work? Do you think about them as a piece or a documentation of research and creating?
HS
I have been researching about narrative and perception, why and where this spiraling flood of information started from. It is such a vast question and it is a life time commitment. My research was such a mess so I tried to organize these fragments but it is impossible to finish it, and it becomes more of a mess again. In relation to my work, we might call the binders references and the drawings works, but I am not sure about this. I am more interested in relations between or among those factual sources, and what I can create from them. For example, there is a moment of happening in between or among the pages. The ink drawings are like images that trigger unknown myths, like what pictures from a story book or religious painting do to a particular, larger myth. I am afraid of that link to a huge image, but at the same time there are always missing links, like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
6.
HS
There is a sense of fragility in relation to your practice and work, would you like to talk about it?
LSK
When you encounter something fragile it immediately changes the relationship you have to your body. You move in space in a different way, creating an equal awareness of both the body and the art work. I like that.
7.
HS
Can you talk about methods of your work in terms of how you put them together both in making and installation?
LSK
I think about arranging a lot, and this comes from a few places. A lot of it happens in the studio. Things often get hung in clusters where there are already nails in odd places, and materials waiting to be used will sometimes lean up against the wall right next to a painting that has been finished. In the moment it just seems practical. But after some time goes by I will look over and realize that it’s a piece; that the group has formed a relationship and is now one thing. Sometimes what appears to be unintentional reveals itself to be intentional. This is good for me, it balances out all of the planning and labor that goes into making so much of the work. A lot of it is about labor and the specific energy I embed into a piece while creating it (which is really physical for me, it’s hard on me). I think a piece holds on to all of that even after it is done.
It also comes from an interest in an ancient practice called “the laying on of stones” where certain minerals or crystals would be placed on the body to heal energetic, emotional or physical ailments. I love this idea that the placement of objects can have a very direct effect on a person. I think about this when installing a show — like the individual pieces are the stones, and the space or the viewer is the body. It’s about a feeling, and maybe at times a kind of healing. When my mum died I spent a lot of time in our home just looking at how she had arranged things. There was a feeling that was left of her that existed in the configuration of her things.
I really consider the relationship objects have to each other, and this new third kind of energy that can be birthed when you bring two things together (like a panting that is a sculpture, or something that reflects and something that absorbs).
8.
HS
What do you think about silence (or music) in relation to your work?
LSK
Silence is such a big part of music and we often don’t think about it in that way, only focusing on what is there, when I think the really important thing about music is what isn’t there, the moments when there is no sound. That question of what is absent/dead/hidden/unseen is at the core of my work. And silence is very much in line with how I think about your previous question, with how I install works together, or apart. That space becomes really specific and important to the feeling I want to create.
There is also a more complicated relationship to music with how I think about abstraction and representation, especially in the monochrome pieces. They could be related to how the German philosophers wrote about music and its relationship to representation, and even to how they connected those ideas to ideas about the soul.
I think about music and its connection to ritual, story telling, and emotion. And I’m really deliberate about what I listen to when working on a piece. I think even the music informs and is held in the work. Sometimes I listen to a song over and over to get its energy or emotion into a drawing or painting. While working on this show I listened to a lot of ambient electronic music, drone metal, heavy tones with heavy emotions. Stuff that’s rough.
9.
HS
In terms of time and space, how does your text work recall memory and non-fiction related to the other work in the gallery?
LSK
I think it goes back to this idea of a third thing… that third thing that is created when you bring two things together. I’m not totally clear where the lines are between memory and fiction — fact and history… or even the lines between time and space. I don’t think there actually are clear lines, and their might not even be lines at all. I don’t want to figure it out or make a claim on it, but rather to set up places where in the act of creating and bringing things together, a third thing is born. And maybe that third thing is something more true.
10.
HS
Echoing your question 2 – What is your relationship with the color black, or darkness as a medium, color, feeling, concept?
LSK
This really is the crux of the work. Even beyond the work, this question bleeds out into my life, and not just my life, but I think into life itself.
There is a kind of mystery in darkness, and a kind of possibility. In the place of no thing there is the possibility for any thing… for every thing! This potential feels so vital and fertile to me. In the darkness there is transformation and communion. Love is often made in the dark, it’s the time of dreaming and silence. It’s the place of the unknown. It has depth. In many ways I am calling for a reclamation of this word. Fear has been so embedded into it, when really darkness holds the most potent power and potential for transformation.
Van Gogh said about darkness, “One of the most beautiful things by the painters of this century has been the painting of darkness that is still color.”
Lauren Spencer King is an artist living in Los Angeles.
Hirofumi Suda is an artist living in Glasgow.