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Imagine a miniature Zen garden for Gulliver. A recent installation
by artist Glenn Kaino is just that: an over-sized replica of a kitschy
desktop sand garden. Complete with wooden frame and gigantic wooden
rake, the normally placid surface is rudely disrupted by a six-foot
high sand castle, surrounded by a map of Xs, Os and arrows –
an improvised plan of attack. The piece comments on the contradictions
of a commercial culture that simultaneously promotes war while searching
for an Orientalized inner peace. As a super-sized version of a miniaturized
Japanese art form, it embodies another contradiction that Gulliver
could relate to: making the miniature large again does not turn
it back into a real Zen garden. It only draws attention to how fake
it was to begin with.
Kaino’s Japanese American identity is kind of like
that over-grown Zen garden. Several times removed from its original
context, it becomes a different thing entirely. When asked about
the influence of his JA heritage on his work, he referred to the
garden: “I’m using some of the reference materials because
that’s very interesting to me and very personal to me, but
I don’t want to be bound by what would be considered a traditional
JA discourse.” His ethnic background is just another “reference
material,” and even then it’s a reference, not to any
actual Zen garden, but to a trendy, commercial imitation. I suspect
many young Yonsei and Gosei feel the same way. “Japanese”
culture arrives on our doorsteps the same way it arrives on everyone
else’s: sanitized and neatly wrapped in digestible Western
packaging. You can buy pre-packaged sushi at the supermarket and
samurai swords on cable TV; geishas and sumo wrestlers routinely
appear in commercials and rap videos. The question of finding a
“real” connection to our Japanese heritage is mostly
moot when our experience and understanding of Japanese-ness comes
to us, not from Japan, or even from our parents, but from American
popular culture. Unlike previous generations who sought authentic
Japanese roots, we know we can’t escape our media-saturated,
corporate-controlled landscape. Kaino’s investigations into
the psychology of war acknowledge that we are all tangled up in
the same duplicitous power structure. “There’s no overt
race war,” says Kaino. “Everything is really codified
with the remnants of the politics of the early 90s and a very complicated,
capitalist-driven international political world. What could possibly
be a new idea to figure out how to locate things?”
Kaino’s goal is to generate as many new ideas as possible.
His “reference materials” are culled from the far-flung
fields of art history, computer science, chess strategy, quantum
mechanics, post-colonial theory, civil rights history, and revolutionary
studies. His installations are often like diagrams or roadmaps,
drawing lines of affinity between seemingly unrelated ideas. “In
my installations and sculptures there is an abstract quality that
allows me to suggest ideas and push things further that doesn’t
require me to rigidly have all the answers,” Kaino says, adding,
“As I’m making these things I come up with new ideas
and think about different reference points and I hope that people
can feel certain things about the work, and that it suggests or
asks bigger questions than we can put into words.” By mixing
references from a wide variety of sources, Kaino is widening the
gene pool from which new forms of thinking and understanding emerge.
An upcoming video piece for an exhibit at the Studio Museum
in Harlem features a scene from the Hughes Brothers’ controversial
movie Menace II Society. Infamous in Asian American activist circles,
the scene depicts the brutal and senseless shooting of two Korean
liquor store clerks by a pair of black youth. It has always bothered
Kaino that the murderous main characters remain sympathetic throughout
the film despite this initial act of wanton violence. The film suggests
that the violence against Koreans is somehow justified as a response
to racist oppression. Kaino re-dubs the scene so that the Korean
liquor store clerk speaks with a heavy ebonics accent, and the black
youth have thick Filipino and Korean accents. The disjuncture created
between image and sound plays with our assumptions about who is
a victim and who is a criminal, forcing us to reconsider the ways
in which we understand the relationship between race and violence.
Works like these place Kaino in a group of media-savvy,
politically astute young artists of color who are re-evaluating
the legacy of “identity art.” A phrase first coined
in the 80s, identity art refers to the work of a pioneering generation
of artists who advocated for mainstream recognition of works that
dealt explicitly with the concerns and experiences of people of
color, women, and queers. Initially a plea for diversity, it quickly
became somewhat limiting. The complexities of individual experience
were reduced to a single ethnic, gender or sexual label. If you
were a Japanese American artist, you were expected to make art about
being Japanese American. Artists like Kaino are breaking away from
these limitations and exploring more nuanced and perhaps more accurate
ways of describing, sharing and questioning our experiences in all
of their complexity. In the process, they may push us slightly off-balance,
but getting lost is more than half the fun. Says Kaino, "This
entire landscape is morphing, and rather than having any anxiety
about where we’re going to end up -- because I think a lot
of people are gripping the side of their chairs and hoping that
we land somewhere that’s going to be beneficial for them --
what I’m trying to do is surf it and enjoy it while it lasts,
because it’s a boring place when it ends."
Kaino’s installation work is on view in October
at The Project in New York City, and in the group show Black
Belt at the Studio Museum in Harlem, October 15 through January
4, 2004.
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