Yui Kugimiya

A group of Japanese artists in the 50s called the Gutai group worked closely around the idea of painting as an autobiographical record, performing action painting by using their bodies. I enjoy looking at images of their work and the photo or video documentation of their performances. You may or may not be familiar with the images of Kazuo Shiraga making “mud painting” with his body wrestling in a pile of mud or Saburo Murakami running through layers of large paper screens to break holes into them, as they are the two most well known images from The Gutai group. The photo documentation presents how theatrical the whole act of making painting is, how the artist becomes a part of a theatrical set and takes on a shamanistic role in the set of making paintings. Considering this theatricality of making paintings and artificially acting body, I no longer see traces of actions in painting as just an autobiography, but rather as a fictional one.

I take a part in considering painting, whether fictional or not, as an autobiographical recording medium. I record my act with both painting and camera. I have been working on a series of large paintings and animations in utilizing an image of a figure walking across the canvas. For these large paintings, I use the technique of stop motion animation. This allows me to can paint by means of a non-painting strategy. I paint and move a figure little by little on a canvas and document it frame by frame. By authorizing this repetitive technique to control the mark making, I try to avoid subjective decision-making and thus invite foreign personality into the process.

The figure being animated on canvas is a furry feline character. By creating and embedding this character in painting, I expel and turn my own foreignness into a literal foreign object and in doing so I reveal the constructs of the creation of foreignness itself.

While I make these large paintings with the technique of stop motion animation, I also make smaller scale sculptural paintings. Using non-traditional materials such as fake fur and yarn in conjunction with oil paint, I transform the paint marks from a conventional painting trope into otherness, the painting from being a flat picture into an almost stuffed-animal-like character.