James Jack

I’m doing an art residency project in Beijing for most of the month of August at the Ku Art Center. It has been refreshing to spread out and make new art works in a studio that’s about twelve times larger than my space in Tokyo. Although the space is raw it has inspired a lot of new ideas for me as I am working on new drawings and photographic works. I have been re-immersing myself in the world of ink and paper (refreshing!) and paying close attention to emptiness. Studio view 1:

I’m working on a new series of grass paintings that will become large scrolls hanging from the ceiling of a former silk factory for the 15th Kiryu Saien Exhibit in Gunma opening the first week of October. The simple shape of a blade of grass is taking on more and more meaning as I spend time “calligraphing” its shape and documenting the blades with a camera. Here is a sample of the works hanging in the studio:

I was most impressed by a studio visit with Jiang Guandong, an artist who is also a Taoist teacher. After a delicious bijou filled evening we exchanged studio visits and transcended our lack of a shared language with a nearly pure visual communication. Experiences such as these have perked my desire to tackle Mandarin when I get back to Tokyo.

I have just posted a brief photo report of highlights from the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in Niigata. Check it out on Tokyo Art Beat‘s site. While it is impossible to summarize such a diverse and spread out exhibition, these were some of the works that I enjoyed during the opening week.

Now that I think about the show it feels like the spaces in between the artists’ work are actually more significant than many of the works themselves. The installations themselves are intriguing but their site-specificity leads one toward the landscape and people themselves, somehow bringing the little details of the inaka that so often go unnoticed into focus. If you do make it out to see the show this summer my best advice is: get lost.

The most fascinating aspects of the area are in the winding back roads and dead end alleyways.

Photo: James Jack

How does an encounter with the royal family affect one’s life? For me it re-affirms the simple activities that I engage in everyday. Somehow it seems to be part of a larger fate that was set up for me, but this is something I’m not exactly sure how to put into words.

There are times when things fall into place and everything seems calculated by a larger unknown presence, I don’t dare to call it anything other than “unknown,” so I’ll leave it at that. Life is just a manner of finding where I fit in the sprockets of this fate, a challenging situation but nothing other than the essence of truly being alive.

In conjunction with their highnesses’ recent visit to Oahu KGMB did a TV series about the Royal family’s historical ties with Hawaii. The video features interviews with me and other scholars who are contributing to strengthening cross-cultural bonds across the Pacific. Check out the full video from KGMB here (Section two includes shots of my studio at Geidai in Ueno.)