Hiroyuki Hamada's show at Art Sites closes October 10 -- last 2 days to see this body of work! See my profile from the East Hampton Star below:
Buddhist Pillow? Bayer Aspirin?
By Janet Goleas (01/20/2009) “I always enjoyed making things,” said
Hiroyuki Hamada, who grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo and today has a
studio in East Hampton. “But everything changed when I realized I was an
artist.”
 Carissa Katz |
Mr. Hamada’s most recent exhibit, at Swarthmore College’s List Gallery in Pennsylvania, closed just weeks ago.
“Hiroyuki’s art is definitely a journey toward a universal
language,” said Andrea Packard, the List Gallery’s director. The show, a
selection of wall pieces, freestanding sculptures, and works on
artist-made pedestals, was enthusiastically received not only by the
college but by the broader community as well.
“I think that he’s very good at creating works that speak
differently to different people,” Ms. Packard continued. “One person
might see the work in terms of formalist or minimalist idioms, another
would see elements of Japanese culture, Buddhism, or the language of
technology. One of the most powerful things about his work is that it is
multivalent in its associations.”
 
From top, Mr. Hamada’s “#61,” “#54,” and “#64,” sculptures made by rubbing a variety of materials into layers of smoothed plaster |
Mr. Hamada’s art is filled with things that look like other
things. Then you blink, and suddenly they look just like themselves.
Contemplative, illusory, and mutable, his imagery as well as his
approach is plastic in nature. Beehives, throat lozenges, Life Savers,
and torpedo silhouettes fill the studio, their surfaces variously pocked
and dimpled, honed to a glossy sheen, or stacked into subcontinents
that cleave to shared edges.
Rubbing resins, wax, and pigment into smoothed and sanded layers
of plaster, Mr. Hamada transforms basic construction materials into
something swelling with spirit and consciousness. It feels as though a
pulse might lurk beneath the finished surface of each object, instead of
the structural foam, burlap, and plaster the artist claims are there.
In spite of such contradictions, Mr. Hamada’s work achieves a
synthesis throughout that is resonant, even tribal, in its homogeneity.
“I was a rebellious kid,” he mused. “I guess I was mad about life’s imperfections. I was angry.”
Mr. Hamada moved to the United States fresh out of high school.
He didn’t much care for the Japanese suburbs but, at odds with his
parents, he was reluctant to move abroad when his father, who worked in
the steel industry, relocated the family to West Virginia.
“I was just hanging around, so my father said, ‘Come with us.’ I didn’t really have anything else going on, so I did.”
The young rebel didn’t speak English, so he enrolled in the local
community college. Learning a new language was a revelation. “If
everyone on earth had to learn one another’s language, all our problems
would be solved,” he said.
Mr. Hamada went through a conversion, a propitious one, you might
say, during this period. “I had a teacher who was a painter,” he said.
“Before that, I never knew you could be an artist. The idea that you
could put things together on paper and make something significant —
something that it could move you — that changed everything for me. At a
certain point, it just became so obvious that I was a visual artist.”
Three years later, when his family returned to Japan, he decided
to stay Stateside. “It seemed like a good idea to live here,” he said,
then paused. “But . . . maybe they abandoned me.”
The young artist soldiered on. He went to graduate school and
then embarked on a series of residencies at venerated artists’ colonies
such as Skowhegan, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the MacDowell
Colony. He met his wife, Evan Harris, a writer, at MacDowell.
“I commuted between New Jersey and East Hampton until she finally
asked me to move in,” Mr. Hamada said. The couple now share the joys as
well as the exhaustion of two young children.
Back in his studio, concoctions of Damar varnish, turpentine,
roofing tar, and melted wax lined worktables. Curls of painter’s tape
cascaded over the sides like bright waterfalls. Other than blue tape and
a single bucket filled with plastic Easter eggs, however, the studio
was nearly devoid of color.
“Kids,” he said, looking down at a mound of broken eggshells
while walking through racks of electric drills, sanders, slabs of foam,
and power cords.
A work in progress, “#56,” hung on the far wall of the studio.
Incised lines filled with oily pigment define the frontal plane as
Herringbone patterns weave across its surface. One of his signature
marks, concentric circles gently drilled into plaster, dot the surface
like tiny crop circles.
In other works, pencil-thin lines glide like birds in formation,
swaying in mathematical warps as if guided by a giant elliptical
compass. The preciseness is uncanny, and it lends a machine-age quality
to the work, as if parts were discovered in an abandoned airplane hangar
and buffed to a shine after years of neglect.
 |
Another work, “#61,” is a meditation on linearity interrupted by a chocolate-brown horizon. Shaped into an eggy cranium, the upper half is covered with larvae-like buds that proliferate like cocoa beans run amok.Its bottom half, a testament to self-discipline, is segmented into geometric ribs that straddle a central spine. They flay outward like inverted frets, each segment incised into plaster and then saturated with resin. Sinking into the surface, Mr. Hamada’s lines mark their surface much the way a tattoo impregnates human skin. They exude a sense of permanence and immutability.
And there lies the proverbial rub. The humanness of this work is
undeniable, not only because of certain anthropomorphic qualities but
also because they exude a fragmented yet genuine pathos. They exist
outside realism or abstraction — separate from divinity but at the same
time contemplative, even devotional.
“I’m not nationalistic at all,” Mr. Hamada said.”I have no strong
allegiance to any country.” Yet his works exude Zen-ness as if just
rolled in a dust bath of pure Buddha-nature.
Like all interesting artists, Mr. Hamada is one in a long chain
of antecedents. Chief among his is Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian
artist who shook things up early in the last century with his “Endless
Columns” and pedestal constructions. Mr. Hamada’s roots are situated not
only alongside the elder artist, but astride a long legacy that ranges
from Cycladic idols to African sculpture, from Hindu architecture to
Inuit homes.
Distinctly minimalist, his works roll over and over, switching
from the ritualistic to the urbane. What resembles a Buddhist pillow
transforms into a Bayer aspirin. A facial facade mutates into a beetle, a
seedpod, or a chrome dome. A prayer tablet shape-shifts into a bathtub.
And so on. In their own way, Mr. Hamada’s works, sotto voce as they
are, are exquisitely playful, bubbling with life and animation.
Working with an austere palette — one that is hard-wrought as
opposed to selected — Mr. Hamada derives his pigmentation from nature:
ivory, white, asphaltum black, earthy brown. Striking a balance between
what is seen and what is remembered, the artist follows a path that
marks its transitions in subtle turns, as if following in the path of an
ever-widening spiral.
“Some people do things because they like it,” he said, “some
because they’re good at it. I’m lucky because maybe I have a little bit
of both.”
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