on hiroyuki hamada
1. In many of your works, there seems to be a tension between three and two dimensionality. You clearly think of your work as sculpture, what is your work’s relationship to painting?
I started with 2D works. I had a teacher in college who shocked me with his drawings. At the time I was a newly arrived teenager from Japan (to the US). I couldn’t speak much English but what I saw in his drawings were loud and clear. Since then, I got hooked on the possibilities of the visual language. At first, figures and narratives in my drawings coexisted with lines, shapes, contrasts, tones and etc. but soon I realized that what I after were the form elements that mysteriously spoke to me. As I started to use paint, it started to be clear that I was looking at my work as objects as oppose to fictitious space looking into the window of the canvas. After that, the painting surface basically grew into 3D objects. I think I do play on the drama between 2D and 3D but I should also note that all the variations on the surfaces are the results of painting, staining or other surface treatments and they are not coming from use of different materials (all on plaster shells on wood/foam core structures). So to answer your question, my work is a lot about painting on 3D objects.
No. 59, 2005-8, 20 diameter x 36 inches, enamel, oil, plaster, tar and wax.
2. Through the relationship between the sculptural and painterly in your work, I couldn’t help but think of Frank Stella. How do you relate yourself to Stella? What is your work’s relationship to Minimalism, a movement Stella went to and away from?
Hmmm… I have a hard time relating what I do to other artists. That’s something I constantly avoid to do. If I see something similar to what I do in other people’s works, I try to find different directions so that I can go where they didn’t go. I have admired some of Frank Stella’s works though. Like those black ones with sharp white lines, you know? I can even fantasize him distancing himself from all the painterly expressionistic works and finding his own path in simple geometry, stark lines, fewer vocabularies and so on: And eventually seeing possibilities in freeing the lines and strips into 3D space to go beyond 2D and sort of coming back to expressionism in his own way… Whereas I’m letting the shapes and volumes grow into the space… But that’s just all in my head, making it all up…
As to Minimalism, if you simply mean as a general, layman’s term (the work sort of having minimal quality with a relatively discrete manner and so on), I can probably say that some of my work might perhaps borderline that category. And if you are talking about strict, art historian standard Minimalism, well, that gets tricky… And in either case, all I can say would be just after thoughts… When I make, I consciously stay away from stories, references, theories and etc. which are outside of the immediate visual effects of my own work in order to focus on the visual language itself. If I notice that the work I’m trying to do is starting to tell a story, for example, I stop. It’s a slow, painstaking process but for me it seems to work well in getting to a “between the lines” sort of hard to get qualities. So when I need a map to guide my own work I sort of have to depend on my own which is based on my own experiences in my studio. It really hasn’t been too practical for me to place myself in any of the ready made charts of “isms”, especially in strict sense, because that only gets my work to artificial, hypothetical situations and I don’t find that to be useful in any actual practice in my studio.
No. 68, 2007-9, 41 x 23 x 20 1/2 inches, enamel, oil, plaster, tar and wax3. Color seems to be drained from your work. Why?
I wonder why… It’s so easy to apply (physically speaking…) and it can be very effective… But on the other hand, the lack of it can be very effective in emphasizing other elements. It can be a great organizational tool as well. I might use more colors in the future though…
4. What is your relationship with your materials? Could you briefly talk about the evolvement of your work and whether your relationship to your materials have changed?
When I was painting on canvas, which was probably 15 years ago or so, I started to use tar and plaster with paint. Using tar along with paint has done some interesting things with the textures, and it also added depth and richness in the brown to black along with beautiful subtle tones in the lighter areas. The effects are immediate, raw and tactile. I think it really reinforced the direction to see the paintings as objects. Another thing I did was using roughed up surface with either modeling paste or plaster to paint on. This also brought up the tactile, object like nature of the works as oppose to illusionistic space on the canvas. And at some point, I just went ahead and covered the whole wood panel with a plaster shell. This allowed me to actually curve into the surface, making holes, and so on. From then on, I’ve pretty much used plaster shells on core structures made of foam and wood to paint on. I still use tar regularly for the surface. I have a few different mixtures to either stain, polish, paint, fill in and etc. It’s pretty amazing what they can do on plaster surface.
I should also mention that my relationship to materials has been always practical. Basically, I’ve used whatever that worked for the visuals. This is totally in line with my approach I described already. I don’t put any symbolic meanings or referential stories to the materials.
By the way, I do enjoy people coming up with stories seeing my work. And I even wonder about literal meanings and background stories in them sometimes. But all these come after the work is finished.
No. 50, 2003-6, 28 x 13 inches, burlap, enamel, oil, plaster, resin, solvents, tar and wax5. What would be an ideal space to receive your work? If you could build your own space, what would it be like?
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was some nice space like the Rothko Chapel. How nice to have your own museum like that! You know? And it is nice to show at nice spaces. But, I think my work is flexible enough in most decent exhibition spaces with good lighting. What I usually do is to come up with the right combination of the pieces to make them speak sort of as a group, letting the viewer experience the rhythm and the flow of the work in the space. There usually are good surprises that the space can do to the work. It’s probably like a musician coming up with right songs for the venue. I think the most critical thing might be the viewer’s state of mind. I think when something speaks to you, that’s usually a lot to do with your mindset. Like suddenly you get struck with the greatest musical experience while you are sitting in your car listening to crackling sound of your car radio. It’s hardly a high end audio sound or being in a prestigious venue that do it to you, but you happen to be ready for the electrifying magic of the music. Unfortunately, that’s something hard to control… But I should be able to help that to happen perhaps. I’ll keep thinking about that.
