L.A.’s ArchiTEXTural Artisans
By JORDAN IKEDA
Rafu Entertainment Editor
Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008

Artists Mike Saijo and Kiyoshi Nakazawa open an art gallery with L.A. in mind.

JORDAN IKEDA/Rafu Shimpo
Top left, Kiyoshi Nakazawa’s ink drawing of a soldier. Above, Nakazawa and Mike Saijo pose in front of their collaboration piece entitled “Crawl to the Earth Thy Mother.”

CARIYASUNO/Rafu Shimpo
A crowd gathers at the gallery’s opening Sunday, Oct. 12.

Mike Saijo had a vision.

Artists usually do. Well, good artists anyway.

It was actually inspired by one of his professors, but the vision was to do an art series on Los Angeles architecture.

He researched the topic. Read a list of books: “Production of Space,” “City of Quartz,” “Four Quartets.” He even had the opportunity to stay in some modern L.A. homes. You know. To get the feel.

“When I would stay the night,” said the soft-spoken Saijo, “it was really sort of a cold and terrifying experience.”

According to him, living inside modern architecture represented psy­chodrama in the modern—the idea of everything being clean, sterile and utopic, but having an unshakeable dis­turbing quality to it.

This unsettling feeling left him pon­dering psychology and its influences and interactions with structural design.

Having spent three years in New York, the native of Los Angeles came back a few months ago to open his gallery, “3000 Worlds in a Moment” that is currently on display at the LA. Artcore Brewery An­nex just outside of Downtown.

But after two years deliberating and working on the project, visions of city landscape, psychodrama, pop culture, and the film “Blade Runner” dancing through his head, Saijo felt like there needed to be another voice. Naturally, he thought of his long-time friend, Kiyoshi Nakazawa of “Drunken Master” comic book fame. The collaboration could not have blended more contrast­ing personalities. Nakazawa is rippling with muscles, with a fu-man chu goatee, shaved head and booming voice. Saijo is thin with a neatly groomed beard and calming voice—in a word, artsy.

While outward appearances seem to clash, their minds work fantastically off of each other. “He told me,” Nakazawa said, “‘This is what I’m doing with ar­chitecture and texts,’ and I would riff off of where he was at that point.

“My response to these architectural diagrams he was making was to sort of look at architecture and see it not so much as a geographical issue, but more as a time/space issue. From there, it turned into mental space, or psychological space.”

Nakazawa swung the architectural direction to memory issues and how architecture and geography in the landscape of a city with a certain cast of characters is divided and becomes a personal reworking of memory.

Drawing from his, well, skills in draw­ing, Nakazawa’s pieces in the gallery are filled with monsters and weapons, crumbling cities, drawn in harsh black and white with war and soldiers. Visuals that nod towards science fiction, pop culture, pulp novels and comic books.

He used black ink and forced him­self to work freehand without layout sketches and incorporated every un-in­tentioned splash or drip of ink into the work. One of his most interesting pieces, titled “Man Down 5th  and Broadway” is a combination of fact and fiction that shows a very real intersection in Down­town littered with people focused on a dead man lying on the sidewalk.

“My art has people and monsters running amok through the city, running amok through architecture,” he said. “I see these as the neurological pathways and freeways in your mind.”

While Nakazawa is known for his adept ability to create anime-inspired, punk-rock drawings, Saijo’s art style trends towards a different path.

In his own words, his art is “quite lib­erating.” While Nakazawa creates stories and images, Saijo takes books and literally frees them from their bindings.

“I wanted to create art that actually said something that was in a context, that allowed me not only to appreciate it visually, but also conceptually,” Saijo said. “I came up with the idea of tearing pages out of their binding and laying them in a spatial order then finding an image, blowing it up to the same size, and transporting it to the pages so that the negative space would have a text.”

He’s freed the Bible from its binding. Freed the Koran. Freed Catholic prayer books and American history books.

For this exhibit, he’s branched out his style with a different approach that uses three dimensions and is far more sculp­tural. The result is some pretty wild, but effectively thought-provoking stuff.

One of his pieces is a series of framed newspaper articles freed from a Los Angeles Times headlines book. He cut out several rings, like targets, and layered different headlines from dif­ferent decades together. In doing so, he has created a convergence of time and space that delivers history in a way not commonly seen.

“The show,” Saijo said, “is about a non-linear, historical perspective and understand­ing our moment as a historical moment.”

“I think a large part of this is a response to growing up in L.A.,” said Nakazawa who is also a native Angelino. “Your un­conscious sort of bubbling up. Articulating something that you see everyday but you just don’t mention. The things that you take for granted. How did this all get here, and why do we live here in the city? Why is L.A. the type of lifestyle that it is? ”

“How does it shape our concept of re­ality?” added Saijo. “And understanding that it is a construction, through movies, through television, through academia, through history books.”

“How architecture becomes this character, this powerful, unspeaking character that you don’t realize is ba­sically effecting the narration of how you see your day-to-day existence,” continued Nakazawa.

Though growing up together, this is the first time that Saijo and Nakazawa have joined for an exhibit and yet, the two men exchange ideas and work off of one another as if they have been collaborating for a long time.

Their collaboration piece, “Crawl to the Earth Thy Mother” is taken from the book “Sacred and the Humane” which traces the history of religions.

In its initial form, the piece’s unbound pages were imprinted with a large tree with a fence branching off of it to one side. It also featured a Rorschach, skull-like inkblot and a large letter A.
“When he first presented it to me, Mike told me, ‘The left is unre­solved,’” Nakazawa said with a semi-incredulous laugh.

Nakazawa began to work his ink skills adding action lines in the top left corner, evolving the other half of the fence into a serpent and fleshing out the inkblot into a real deal skull.

“No preliminary sketches,” he said. “One take. No erasing. Go in straight with the ink and if made a mistake, included the mistake in the drawing. There’s a lot of mistakes.”

“But that’s what I love most about his drawing,” said Saijo.

Mistakes be damned, the piece is a reflection of a vision come to fruition. Nakazawa’s rawness blends perfectly with Saijo’s refinement and intricacy creating an amalgamation of memory and space, architectural aspects, Biblical intonations, visuals and concepts that stimulate the mind.

The finished work of two gifted architects.

The exhibit is open through Oct. 29 Thursday-Sunday, 12 to 4 p.m. For more info, call (213) 617-3274 or visit www.laartcore.org.