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ART REVIEW BY KATE BONANSINGA
Blue Sky/Green Grass by
James K. Yu Recent Work |
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James K. Yu credits the Japanese designer Shigeru Miyamoto as one of six antecedents to his current body of paintings, Blue Sky/Green Grass. Miyamoto developed Super Mario Brothers, a video game where the main character grows in size and power when he eats a "Head Mushroom." Yu's paintings, like video games, create an alternative reality, where smiling, cartoon-like characters float in a video-hued environment. The red-spotted Head Mushroom is the most frequently recurring subject in this humorous paradise; there is also a grinning "Power Star"; several round, bald chuckling heads floating above the grass in Downtown Scene; a reclining Snoopy; and a large baseball being pushed up a hill by a lilliputian Sisyphus. Aptly placed in the context of the 'zines and independent-press publications at Reading Frenzy, these images will charm those familiar with video and comic-book culture, as well as fans of painting. Although Yu claims not to be interested in the distinctions between high and low art, he does an exceptional job of bridging the two. He considers video games, which he has been playing for about 13 years, to be as important to our culture as any other media; the games' heroes and villains are thus worthy of depiction in paint. Yu created each piece in less than an hour, impressively inspired execution considering the fact that painting is not his sole vocation: He's also a musician and an advocate for the homeless. Most of the works are latex paint and oil pastel on plywood or discarded building siding; one diptych consists of an Oregon State University beaver and a University of Oregon duck, each rendered on a 9-inch saw blade. These are not the subjects of what most would consider good painting, and this novelty is precisely what makes Yu's work so exceptional. He takes a fresh look at one of pop culture's most pervasive manifestations and, in so doing, places himself as an artist worth noting. Yu's orientation toward pop culture and his lack of formal art training results in paintings that cross and then recross the lines between folk art, comic-book illustration and fine art. They dwell as comfortably with the creations of Dr. Seuss and Mr. Imagination, an untrained artist who creates figurative and architectural shapes from bottle caps, as they do with color-field painting. By recording the popular icons of the past and present decades, Yu captivates a wide audience, awakening our senses of humor and our imaginations, commenting in paint on the landscape of the video screen and comic book. Ren Sakurai, like Yu, draws upon images from pop culture, but in Sakurai's case, its the historical culture of 18th-century Japan. Sakurai renders precise and detailed images reminiscent of ukiyo-e, prints that portrayed courtesans and kabuki actors, objects of the leisurely attentions of the less cultured merchant class. Sakurai's renderings of swords, family crests and the rising sun of the Japanese flag draw upon the culture of the samurai warrior (a common subject of kabuki) and his parallel, the 20th-century Japanese businessman. Images are fragmented and reconstituted: A knife emerges from an isolated human ear and is on the verge of piercing a shouting, disembodied head. Sakurai adopts the bold color and clear lines of tattoo art and graphic design to incorporate English terms such as "comrade," recalling communism as well as community. The use of popular icons in fine art is not new: Andy Warhol represented movie stars, Roy Lichtenstein incorporated comic strip characters and imagery, and Keith Harring referred to 1980s graffiti art. But Yu's video-based images and Sakurai's combinations of images are new to the fine-art world, where novelty is usually met with resistance. With resistance, however, comes change, a potentially positive result of these artists' incorporation of icons from popular culture.
originally published August 26, 1998 |
