Audio Tour

Eric:
Eric Nakamura from Giant Robot, and we’re at JANM, and it’s part of the Biennale part five, and it’s our thirtieth year anniversary from the start of the Giant Robot zine. I think this exhibition’s going to feature a lot of artists, but I think it has artists I’ve worked with for a while and artists that I’ve kind of been through a lot of things with, and then it has new artists as well. I think the idea is to try to mix the past and present because it’s our thirtieth year, and I wanted to kind of honor the idea of time and time spanning.

I think some of the exhibition art will also be older. Some of the art will be from past years, and then some of the artists will be brand new. The idea is just try to mix everything, and then at the same time, we’ll have our Giant Robot section. That’s going to feature photos from the very beginning and some ephemera, but it’s going to feature the magazines and photos from the beginning and then photos from after life goes digital.

Darren:
My name is Darren.

Trisha:
My name is Trisha, and we are a husband-and-wife artist team working under the name Giorgiko.

Darren:
I grew up in Southern California and I’m a fourth-generation Japanese American.

Trisha:
I am a second-generation Korean American, originally from the Bay Area.

Darren:
Both of us being Asian American and growing up in the Christian faith has significantly impacted our experience of life and how we view the world. And that has found its way into the stories that we tell through our artwork.

Trisha:
We met in college and began experimenting with artistic collaboration around 2012. In 2018, we adopted the moniker Giorgiko, and have been working under that name till now.

Darren:
Our work tends to be anachronistic, so it is influenced by history, which in my mind is in general the story of humanity. This show at JANM feels personally significant. I’ve come to this museum since I was a young boy. I’ve grown up around J-Town, around the cherry blossom festivals and Nisei Week, so I’ve always been conscious about being Japanese, but it’s also very conscious that culturally I’m an American. My bachan, my grandma, is the last living person in my immediate family that experienced firsthand what it meant to be a Japanese American person during World War II, so this body of work feels much more personal and reflective than other work that we might show elsewhere. At the same time, these pieces are consistent with the kinds of themes that we tend to explore in our artwork because people across time and cultures have all experienced various kinds of pain and difficulty, and we’ve all suffered throughout history at the hands of other people or sometimes ourselves.

Trisha:
A big theme found throughout most of our artwork is empathy. Even if some viewers may not have experienced such things like incarceration or imprisonment firsthand, we’re sure everyone has experienced universal emotions like loneliness, identity crisis, grief. These kinds of experiences transcend culture and time, and we hope that visitors will find those kinds of common denominators in our artwork, and we hope that they will connect with the emotions and experiences of our characters and feel a little more seen and maybe even take it further and be moved to empathize with others around them, recognizing that whether friend or foe, we’re all connected by the common story of humanity.

Darren:
This body of work is quite personal to me and my family history. Being a fourth-generation Japanese American, I had family members who experienced all aspects of being a Japanese person during World War II. I had family that fought in Europe against the Nazis. I had family in Japan. I had family in prisons in the United States, in the concentration camps. I had family that was free in the United States. This work is a direct exploration of some of those thoughts and feelings that I’ve had from hearing about my family’s experience and the experience of so many other families as well.

So the theme of this work explores feelings of displacement, of the duality of identity, longing for home, longing to feel safe. These are feelings that are universal. And they don’t just exist as distant memories or distant experiences from the past, but these continue to be questions and feelings that many people carry today.

Trisha:
Far From Home 1 depicts a man with glasses wearing a wrinkled blue cap and a robe that looks something like an American bathrobe crossed with a Japanese yukata. The character’s comfortable robe and chipped, yet functional, coffee mug indicate the ease of one resting at home, though he stands in a desolate place.

The Japanese igeta pattern on the cuffs and collar of his robe abstractly represents the wooden frame of water wells, contrasting symbolically with the desert environment.

Darren:
The painting speaks to the feelings of being a foreigner and a traveler making a home in a new lands. Before World War II, many Japanese Americans worked agricultural jobs. They became known for their gaman spirit as they turned empty wastelands into fruitful farms.

Trisha:
Broken Sakura depicts two identical women standing together but facing different directions. The two women are surrounded by numbered barracks and guard towers. Their matching blouses have a cherry blossom pattern. Cherry blossoms, known as sakura, are a national symbol of Japan and represent the duality of life and death, hope and mortality. In the painting, none of the flowers are whole as each one is missing a petal.

Darren:
Broken Sakura speaks to the dual conflicted identities of many Japanese Americans during World War II. Being an American by citizenship and culture but viewed as an enemy because of one’s ancestry. The challenges of feeling like one person split into two due to circumstances out of one’s control as loyalties to nation and tribe are called into question within and without holding the tension between life and death, whether in the body or in the soul.

Trisha:
Far From Home 2 depicts a young girl with a Japanese hairstyle and American dress, holding a broken and mended teacup. She stiffly poses in a home that doesn’t belong to her next to a portrait of someone who looks nothing like her, bathed in warm and cold lights.

Darren:
This painting is a homage to my bachan, my grandma, who spent the last two years of high school living in a Jewish American family’s home in Minnesota. She cleans and babysat to earn her keep while attending school because her family couldn’t afford to live together. Far From Home 2 speaks to the experience of my bachan, as well as many other young Japanese American girls post-World War II, who were separated from family for the sake of survival with dreams of being united again.

What is your name? Please tell us a little bit about yourself. 
My name is Mike Shinoda. I was studying to be an illustrator before my band Linkin Park took off. Since then, I’ve been able to channel my creative energy into concepts, music, and visuals for the band and my other endeavors.

How did you get involved with Giant Robot?
I think I first connected with Eric ten to fifteen years ago, around the time of some gallery art shows I did.

Can you please describe the work you’re showing for this exhibition?
These are the ten paintings I did for my Fort Minor album, The Rising Tied. I painted them during the period when I was making that album. Each was photographed and incorporated in the album packaging, merchandise, and live show.

Does knowing your artwork will be shown at JANM affect your creative process or the art itself? If so, how?
JANM has hosted two of my solo art exhibitions, Glorious Excess (Born) and Glorious Excess (Dies). I love what the Museum stands for, and the way they connect our history with our present. It’s a special place for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles.

What do you want visitors to take away from your work?
Like the Fort Minor album, this work was inspired by my experiences making the music, and by the hip hop and art I grew up on in the ’90s. It was a time when the term “street art” was new and not widely used, and the line between “low brow” and “high brow” visual art was blurring quite a bit. I was always more of an illustrator than a photorealistic painter, and this work was a big step towards finding a unique visual language of my own.
 

Eric Nakamura:
How did you start off doing art in these boxes? Because I remember when you were at Art Center, you didn’t do this.

Sean Chao:
No. Yeah. Yeah. So like I always I people say, think outside the box. I guess I’m thinking more inside a box. So I just start with making small characters and then eventually I want to put the character in a environment. And that’s how this whole idea came up. Just stuff, just building an environment for it. And then I like making art related to nature.

So there’s more work related to water sceneries and this more animals that there are otters, monkeys, and eventually I have more like fish. It’s just starting to creating to me to a small world of myself. And yeah, and I also have these pieces that more of geometric shapes and mechanical looking characters in there. These are all related to a show I had before. It’s based on the idea of losing a loved one. 

Eric Nakamura:
Can you talk about this installation?

Yoskay Yamamoto:
Yes, this installation, Daydream Moon Age. Daydream is a title and I originally created this back in 2021. I was living in Phoenix, Arizona at the time and then but the exhibition was in L.A. so once it was all done, I had to pack it up in the U-Haul to take it to his gallery to exhibit. But it was like doing like a pandemic time.

And in a Phoenix home that we are living with. That’s my wife, Kristi, over there when we are living there. When we moved in, since it was like an industrial kind of loft space, there was no, like storage space, no shelving. So I build a lot of the shelving around the house. So a lot of these are like the leftover scraps from those, like a shelving unit that I build.

So a lot of like a cheap, you know, paint lumbers and or other like a bass wood or like some other poplar that I use to make my canvases for. So all these homes that I made from, like scrap materials, then my idea was to create something out of like sustainable material because that I’ve been trying to implement like my studio practice to be a little bit more sustainable than I used to be.

So even Eric, when he was putting up his like a fence at his home, he had all these like a little bit of like leftover fencing material. So that’s also in there. And the moon is made out of paper maché. I collected all that like, you know, junk mails, some paperwork from like my wife’s office, some of bad sketches and bad ideas in there.

So it’s like a way for me to be able to make something, you know, like folk art material. But once, you know, you spend enough time, energy and care to it, you can make something, I don’t know, something pretty. And that was my effort to do that. And also like that thematic, like a meaning of the work is I wanted to make something that represented a community.

Like knowing Eric for like a past, like, you know, ten years and plus like his community that he created at his gallery. Like, it means a lot to me, especially for, like, an immigrant, like myself, like I don’t have, like, home here, but every time I went to his shop, he was always welcoming. And I met a lot of people, including my wife, there.

And I got to make like a lot like lifelong friends at his shop. And it’s like a creative individual who has like a hyper sensitive, like, fragile soul. Like my it’s I don’t know. He meant a lot to me to, you know, have a friend like Eric. Sorry to have a place like Giant Robot. So that’s kind of the meaning behind it.

Yoskay Yamamoto:
The portraits, these heads, same thing. It’s like me trying to implement my sustainable approach to my studio practice. So all the heads are made with, like, a paper maché. The paper maché. Like, practice is a big part of a Japanese full guard called manga. So. But manga is usually sold as, like, a souvenir. So a lot of the craftsmen, they don’t get to spend as much time to their pieces as, you know, I get to.

Yeah. So some of them based on like a Japanese older manga. So this is based on this manga called the Big X that was created by Zuko somehow, but it’s like it’s definitely have like a lot of references to the World War Two because Tesco somehow you know, he’s like a godfather of a manga, but he got influenced by American Sun Comics and he, you know, happened to find after like World War Two.

So even like Godfather of the manga had like a Western influence. And since this is a Japanese National American Museum, I thought it was important for me to, you know, connect that kind of time period. So I actually added phrasing saying Go for broke, which was a part of the, you know, the phrasing for, for, for to the army, who a lot of them got the purple, Purple Heart, the medal because they fighting like one of the hardest battles.

So that was kind of a homage to that.

Eric Nakamura:
And can you talk about the one of the pompadour?

So in Japan there’s a culture here called Yankee, which is this like a Japanese gang kind of group. But they really got influenced by like Western culture a lot. So like the pompadour, like Elvis rockabilly. But they were known for like, you know, customizing their motorcycles, their cars and stuff like that. But everything became from like come to culture of like, you know, the Western counterculture of like hot rods.

Felicia Chiao:
Hi. My name is Felicia Chiao. I’m a Bay Area based artist and illustrator. I actually have a background in industrial design, but started doing art full-time in 2022. A lot of my work is based on traditional mediums such as COPIC marker and ink on brown toned paper. But recently I’ve made the switch to watercolor for gallery shows, and so there's a little bit of both.

Felicia Chiao:
I first got involved with Giant Robot back in 2018 or 2019. I was working as an industrial designer full time, but I was drawing a lot for fun. And I happened to be in LA to work with Static Medium, and I met Eric and showed him all my illustration work, just seeking advice on what I could do with what I had. And he began inviting me to a lot of group shows and events. And Giant Robot was the first to give me a solo show in 2020. So that’s how I kicked off my gallery career. And ever since, I’ve been joining all the annual post-it shows and all the other fun stuff that’s going on.

Felicia Chiao:
Well, so when I started drawing, I was really bad at backgrounds. I used to just draw the front character or whatever, and there wouldn’t be anything behind it. And at the same time, I was drawing a lot, I majored in industrial design. I was doing a lot of concept sketching and drafting and we learned perspectives and stuff.

And I realized like once I had a box set up, even just like a one point perspective box, you can fill it with objects and it kind of creates its own world. So I do a lot of interiors because once you have a room set up, you're like, Obviously I need a door, I need a window, and then you can start to put objects in them.

And it just gave me a kind of constraints and a platform to be able to start to work from. And then I kind of really liked when I started doing multiple boxes, it almost looks like a comic strip and it has a bit of a narrative, even if they’re not directly connected. And I started putting little doors and ladders, and this one doesn’t go through as much, but it was kind of fun to do a play of like what fits compositionally.

I don’t know. I stay home a lot, so it’s a lot of home drawings. I used to live in like an uninsulated attic in college, and then right out of college I was in like a laundry closet. So I was drawing these, like, really nice rooms because I was like, I dreamed of having, like, windows. And I was just kind of drawing what I wanted to be.

Ideally. Luckily, I’m in like a really lovely apartment now, but a lot of these drawings were just kind of like wishful thinking.
 

Felicia Chiao:
Most of my early work is all in sketchbooks. I started filling sketchbooks in high school, and got really into it through college. It was always just a hobby of mine, and I did a lot of drawings with Copic markers on the brown-toned paper. I’m currently working on sketchbook seven. The one in the display case is sketchbook five, as well as a published copy of my sketchbook six. I think it kind of shows my work at its purest intention, which was just kind for me, and kind of really intimate. And as my career grew, I started doing the larger, looser works that are now framed up in the gallery, but I still love just going back and working in my sketchbook whenever I have free time. I’m hoping to get sketchbook number seven, finished this year and have it published next year.