Since I’ve decided to be honest, I’ll admit something that would be incredibly obvious to most people when they see my work. It’s important for me to get it out in words, though, to overcome my embarrassment. My first dream… to go truly right back to the start of my creative journey… was to become a manga writer, and my main focus for most of my developing years was on conjuring up narratives, characters and worlds inside my head to try and manifest them in illustrated format.
My early ~ inspirations ~ were vintage to contemporary shoujo (=’for young girls’) manga, but the name wasn’t accurate to the content. Keiko Takemiya’s sci-fi works were a massive one for me growing up. So was Mineo Maya’s works, which I have no idea why my mother never censored me from, because his main series was a satire black comedy series drawn in an Aubrey Beardsley inspired-style about a diabetic dictator and his adventures with gay men working in MI6.
Anyway these particular selections were all actually very rich with queer and feminist history – at least way more than you would expect when you hear “pop culture magazines for young girls” – and this I can rant on about for ages, but I can leave that for another time. My mother inherited to me a lot of artistic inspiration, but it was and still is difficult to navigate this with her simultaneous typically East-Asian-First-Gen-Immigrant manner of insistence that I needed a job that made good use of my new access to Western culture to ultimately acquire good money.
The interesting thing about worldbuilding is that once you’ve gotten into a habit of doing it, they seem to live in your head forever. So I can very easily daydream about the various worlds which I set up for this even now like time never passed, which is both comforting and I think potentially dangeous. Maybe this is because I never managed to complete any of the stories. After I found out the reality of how taxing a manga writer’s life can be when contracted to these companies through the many anecdotes of ‘death through overwork’, I couldn’t see a future in it anymore. What’s the difference between ‘death through overwork’ on an office desk and one on top of a sketchbook? In hindsight, I think I just latched onto ‘manga writer’ as a dream because it was the first “make good money” dream I saw in media that involved drawing. But I was quite serious about it… as much as a tween can be. I even had the initiative to ask for a visit to the publisher’s of my favourite magazine once and kept submitting my oneshot comics to them. They only let me have a visit because I was visiting from shiny ‘Igirisu‘ England, though….
Once my childhood dream was shattered, I spent most of my time just drawing mountains of fanart up until around age 18, trying to escape from the aforementioned pressure to make me into a graphic designer – before I changed course entirely and got more hooked on playing in a band and making “beats” (I like to consider it music). I can’t pinpoint exactly when, and I hadn’t wanted to accept it for a long time, but my creative drive behind drawing as a skill probably more or less ended somewhere between GCSEs and A levels. Since then, it’s all just been a struggle trying to find the passion in it again.
ASIAGRAPH
One big driver in this was my repeated involvement in “ASIAGRAPH”, a yearly exhibition put on at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. I was 13 at the start and I sporadically continued submissions until around 16. This was the first time something I made was shown through a setting faced to the general public. The curator had invited me to submit artwork through a message on the popular Japanese illustration website ‘Pixiv’ – an equivalent to ‘deviantART’, and I was at first excited that in Japan, digital art was taken seriously enough to justify a physical exhibition at a national institution (and yes, I also loved that I could receive updated copies of CLIP Studio Paint as a prize).
But I suppose the same exact situation bothered me. I didn’t have the words or knowledge to fully describe it at the time, but I could tell that I felt uncomfortable with the way my work was being framed. Firstly, though I had made the curator very aware that I lived and had grown up in the UK since the age of 6, they always made sure to write “Japan” next to my name. I couldn’t understand why this was apparently as important as the work’s title. Yes, the first image I submitted, as you can see, is heavily inspired by Asian cultural symbols. The yin-yang motif, the moon-mirror motif, the koi fish. My first fictional stories were very focused on Japanese history, an interest indeed fuelled by immigrant identity confusion. For sure, this work was acting as a straight-forward love letter to my home country’s culture, but I felt misrepresented – I knew this work would not have been made if not for my switch in lived culture.
As well as this, I could tell that I was being praised on how profitable my work could become if I kept going. I honestly think this work by my 13-14 year old self looks rounds more professional, polished and technical than anything I’ve made since I entered higher education and those descriptors still enrage the rebellious 16 year old in me that I haven’t been able to deport out of my brain since it was born… well, maybe through this exact event. It was frustrating because the more disillusioned I was becoming, the more the adults around me were starting to become convinced that perhaps letting me be creative was okay.
Of course, now I understand that being put inside a ‘national’ gallery means being represented by nationality. And I clearly understand that this is not a route that I like. But I appreciate this experience for being a trigger in my need to verbalize the discomfort of being forced into self-orientalization through many layers of power, specifically in the context of East Asia. Writing this now I realise why I have been so sensitive to which inspirations come from which side of my two cultures, when really I wish I could see all art in a neutral way…
I don’t really think my experience being ‘an immigrant’ moving from Japan (a formerly imperialist-fascist country) to the UK (a formerly imperialist-fascist country) is really that significant to justify being the inspiration to all of my art, or what I really want to say/explore, since that word doesn’t even really point to people like me in today’s UK politics but I guess it’s undeniable that it’s not easy for a 6 year old to accept such a big change in culture and that it haunted my creative urges for a long time, maybe up until a few years ago. It kind of got strengthened back again during corona times since I experienced first-hand outright racist abuse with an intent to hurt me in a short-term series for the first time just walking around London. Before then it was all just very subtle undertones of discrimination that I had noticed. So I understand why a lot of people who share my race and background are bothered currently and I’m thankful people are out there talking about it. I also have sympathy for the international students who had to come here smack bang in the middle of that with a medium-to-fully developed brain that can understand people’s malice.
On the other hand, I think I’m also writing about this aspect of my childhood with a bit of ongoing bitterness because it makes me sad to see the creative people around me still stuck in this scheme of identity politics “representation” making artforms from their culture into a digestible form for the average ‘artsy’ middle-class-to-elite audience to cultivate intrigue. Unfortunately it’s one of those ‘if you know you know’ kind of things but my point is if a work involves “themes” that a stupid 13 year old can draw into a piece like above then it shouldn’t really be automatically mysterious to you; just because it shows a circle half filled with black and the other half in white instead of some judeo-christian symbol, it’s not suddenly more valuable… And a lot of people like me need to realise that, this intrigue which comes along with what it truly is, the lack of will to understand us as anything similar to themselves, is not something to take pride in. Also, they’re probably never going to viscerally understand that your criticism of a certain kind of pop in your post-war culture is equal to a criticism of All American Globalism. It’s always going to be seen as our problem, unless you get rid of all abstraction, by which point it becomes too political.
National Student’s Art Exhibition
By the end of sixth form I didn’t even know what to make anymore. I had to make stuff for my grades, and I knew painting was the easiest way to get marks, but I just hated painting. (I ranted and ranted about hating it vocally in my classroom and that was unlike my usual quiet well-behaved student self. I feel pretty apologetic towards my art teachers from back then since they basically had to see me awkwardly and only semi-successfully hiding mini breakdowns, with my only tool for emotional coping getting stuck.) I think it shows very well in the painting here that was still almost mechanically sent off on submission by my school, shown at the mall galleries… My one is the sort of modernist-style one without any character whatsoever, in boring brown, sepia tones and cold harsh lines.
Honestly I think it’s great that there are “National Student Exhibitions” because in format I don’t think it’s much different to your average commercial painting auction. Matter of fact these works were all ‘on sale’. I remember the opening night started with some guy in a suit and very round glasses (at least in my memories) waddling over to the podium to speak about the investment made into the creative industries by the government and how much capital it’s made. By this point I was juggling lots of creative career options and being a painter really was a high contender but I knew if this was meant to be my government-subsided initiation into that world then I wasn’t going to take it.
Goldsmith’s Summer School + “Omission”
By the point that I was meant to start thinking seriously about my university choices I was dying to be allowed a space to just be myself again. After a lot of research I was dead set on Goldsmiths being the one. CSM strangely smelled of the commercialisation I was trying so hard to run away from (though I still applied and worked hard enough to get accepted by them through, I don’t know, some sort of Stockholm syndrome). The Slade was a bit too stiff looking and I still hadn’t overcome my other trauma of forced painting just yet. And I didn’t really understand the character of any of the other universities.
If the summer school is still ongoing and it’s anything like the one I went to I recommend applying to it to a lot of prospective students, even if you’re not obsessed with entering the university like I was for some reason. It’s a nice break away from everything and a good reminder that there’s a whole world of art outside of your academics waiting to greet you. (Though my actual opinion of my experiences being a real undergraduate student at Goldsmiths is still to come through separate blogposts…)
I’ll save you from seeing my first attempt at conceptual art at this summer school which was nothing other than an expression of self-serving catharsis to “do it because I can” (but hey, that’s Dada, right) – but the best thing to come out of it was probably the invitation from Lucas, a studiomate at this short term ‘residency’ if you could call it that who had decided to put on a group exhibition in Peckham which I assume was following some advice from the tutors there. I guess it’s quite normal for artists to experience a lot of DIY shows first and then to dream about more ‘official’ or ‘established’ forms of shows but I suppose I already came to a quick conclusion that I wanted nothing to do with ‘established’ shows at that point subconsciously, because I was excited about this one post-the other two above. People just saw students playing about but I saw agency in it. We were choosing where to put our works and how – we were the ones advertising it in a certain light. It was titled ‘Omission’… and had a long depressing artist’s statement about being omitted from society or something super cliche. But I remember it in a very fond light because as naive as it all was, we were all just being honest, really.
Being honest – is an important thing for me here, because although these blog posts may seem to be nothing other than personal accounts, to me, putting this on my website in public for anybody to see is sort of my way of actively detaching myself from this path of self-production that is fed to us as a necessity when we are still so vulnerable and young. There were a few other instances of my work being in public during these years, like my slight attempt at political messaging in a blue-red-and-white painting of bankers drinking outside their pubs ironically being hung at the walls of the Bank of Cyprus through school relations as an honorable mention, but I wanted to specifically focus on the things I’ve put on applications and artist CVs in the past.
This is my confession booth moment, aimed towards soothing my slightly younger self, by revealing what those names and titles and location names actually entailed for myself emotionally, rather than to try and insist that I am a valuable young artist with a lot of expectations backing me up.
Still, having written it all out of course I am thankful for the experiences I got. It’s impossible to understand that something isn’t for you unless you see parts of it in action.