Hell Yes
Scott Weiland
On weekends when I was a child, my father would roam around greater Atlanta looking for interesting things to photograph. I happened to be with him the day he discovered the artist Nellie Mae Roe. Nellie lived in a small house with a lemon tree in the yard. We began visiting the tall, African-American woman who always wore a muumuu dress and a wig. In my father’s photographs, she’s often holding handmade dolls that looked a bit like her. She used crayons and ballpoint pens to create fantastic landscapes and even her chewing gum made it into these sculptural conglomerations. The lemons on the tree were the plastic variety you’d buy in the produce section of your local supermarket.
Some of Kinya Hanada’s work reminds me of Nellie’s work. Kinya, aka Mumbleboy, has a similarly broad range to his creativity and his work has gotten increased exposure over the last few years. He has shown works on paper in gallery settings, flash animations on the web and combined animations with video in VJ events, such as a recent stint in Berlin. Like Nellie, he also makes dolls.
I asked Kinya about the fact that I see a connection between his art and outsider or naïve art. "I think I see what you mean though I think I’m somewhere in between just because I did go to school and studied art specifically. I did have to unlearn a lot of things afterwards before I felt free to make art the way I really wanted."
Scott Weiland: What if I said your work is a bit psychedelic?
Kinya Hanada: Yeah, I don’t do drugs, but I think I am quite naive. I almost feel like if I lost all my naivety, I wouldn’t be able to make art the way I do now. I think the word psychedelic may be more specific than what I’m going for, but I do like to make things that are sort of outside what is common visually.
SW: Where are you from originally?
KH: I’m Japanese and although I lived two-thirds of my life in the US, I have remained very Japanese in some ways, more so than most people with a similar history. I’m just as much from the US as I am from Japan, in a way. I don’t really try to bring Japanese references into my work, but I think it just so happens that whatever I bring into my work is Japanese.
SW: What contemporary artists do you like?
KH: I haven’t been following contemporary art so closely lately, but I think there are three artists I have liked ever since I’ve known of their work, and they are Jean-Michel Basquiat, Shinro Ohtake and Eye, who is also in the band Boredoms.
SW: Have you seen that big yellow sculpture by Noboru Tsubaki, called Aesthetic Pollution? I think it was in a show recently at the Japan Society. Your work seems nearly all-encompassing; it doesn’t exclude the possibility of so many aesthetic turns. I assumed the notion of aesthetic pollution wouldn’t make sense or maybe your work reflects the kind of image mixing that goes on in our own subconscious as we ingest so many patterns, images both still and moving.
KH: OK, that makes sense.
SW: Is there such a thing as aesthetic pollution?
KH: I’m not sure what you mean by aesthetic pollution, but if it’s something negative, I don’t agree with that notion. I think in visual art, you are criticized if your work looks similar to someone else’s, but in other arts sometimes it is encouraged to work similarly to others. I think if it seems like a worthwhile thing to work like someone else, then it should be done. Personally, I do feel like sometimes I’m working too similarly to the way the artist Eye, but I think rather than worrying about that I should just continue to work and see where it takes me.
SW: The whimsical sensibility in your work…
KH: I suppose I don’t really enjoy things that are too serious and so I probably feel the need to be somewhat whimsical in my work.
SW: Why do you think that your work is so well received?
KH: I am not sure that it is well received by everyone, but it seems well received by some people. As far as why, well I try to make work that is interesting to me personally and there are some that seem to have the same sensibility as me.
SW: Doing VJ gigs…
KH: It really depends on each gig, but this last one in Berlin was fantastic. I use a video mixer. It’s kind of like the DJ mixer just that, instead of mixing audio, mixes video signals. You can do just a regular fade mix, key out certain hues, tones or also put effects on them like colorization and inversion and so on.
What I do is I bring two sources together and mix in real time. One is flash animation and the other is the videos I made in "After Effects." It’s very unpredictable because even if you know the two pieces, they can come together at different points than you might have expected and create a sort of a real time collage. So, in a way, I am reacting to what happens and then adjusting the mix according to what I see. It’s sort of an intense way to do it because you have to be on your toes.
Anyway, this gig was great. The crowd was really into the visuals and was dancing like crazy until the morning. A lot of people came up to me and told me they liked what they saw. That was great, but it doesn’t always work out so great. When it doesn’t work out too well, it usually has to do with technical things like the projector at the venue is crappy or the organizer forgot to prepare a space to project, like a white screen, so you end up projecting onto a red wall or wall with windows.
When it’s going good, there are some moments that just seem so magical. That just sounds like I’m praising myself, but sometimes stuff happens that I could probably never have done in a premeditated way. I would really love to capture that and maybe make it into something like a piece of art. I think I definitely get new ideas from doing that like how to combine things in a way I never thought of before.
SW: Your non-animated work seems to collapse time and compact impressions into the mix but, I guess, that’s what collage is. Many of the animated ones are sequential and less compact. That’s why I always liked the "Quicks" because they were the animated equivalent of the collages.
KH: Yeah, I suppose with animation and video, I haven’t gotten to where it’s like a moving collage. I think when I VJ, it’s more like that, but so far I haven’t been able to re-create that. I hope it’s something I can achieve.
SW: Doing Beck’s video, "Hell Yes"…
KH: It’s brought me some attention, but probably not nearly as much as you think. If anything I think it’s brought me the confidence to be able to make videos.
SW: Having your work not recognized by a peer as art with capital A? Well, he was quite narrow-minded. I think art is something anyone can make. If anything I think the more you try to make art, the less art it becomes.
KH: Yeah that reminds me of Alan Kaprow’s essay "The Education of the Un-Artist". Did you read that one?
SW: No, I haven’t read that. What’d it be like if you were discovered by the NY, capital A, art world?
KH: Well, it’s not like I can make better work just because I have more money to make it. For the most part, money would just give me the time I need to work my butt off like I never could before. But there is one thing I would do which is to hire some friends of mine who can program and build stuff and I would make an interactive installation. I have some other installation ideas, but I might actually try it for real, so until then I’m not going to tell. Sorry.
SW: No problem. I, for one, can’t wait.
