A Gripping Conversation with Tomoaki Shibata

Photo: Loren Philip

Tomoaki Shibata is a Japanese artist based in Los Angeles. His work has been displayed in numerous galleries throughout Los Angeles. I had the pleasure of talking with Tomoaki about where he wants to be in terms of his art, how he uses lines in his artwork, and whether the art process can be limiting.

UZOMAH: What are some differences and similarities that you have found in pursuing your art education in the United States versus in Asia?

TOMOAKI: In my opinion, the quality of art education is universally decided by the professor`s characters which are colorful. The systems to enter art schools change depending on national social structures. But I believe in spiritual connections that students meet the right educators in the right timings, always. "Moving" is an advanced figurative drawing style in which models are moving. Japanese professors assigned me it when I was a Nihonga (Japanese Painting) major student in Tokyo in the early 2000s. I drew colorful Showa era nostalgic and new Japan models who were butoh dancers and chindon'ya performers there. In Los Angeles, I coincidentally met a professor assigning to draw still lifes with ink and a twig in a city college. When I met him I found that he was using a clear file that my friend and artist in Japan made ( so we had a mutual friend). And I eventually realized that this teacher`s teacher was a gallerist in a gallery where my first US exhibition took place ten years before. And another American professor was giving her lectures to share her perspective as a contemporary living painter while using slideshows in her painting classes. I met her in the same city college. I saw her regular American students from an old Veteran to high school students visual kids in her painting class. I was meeting a very visible sign of the diversity of the city. I love both countries` art educators and art school`s compassion, although I shun schooling teachers.

U: How much influence does traditional techniques and uses of brushes from Japan and throughout Asia have on your work?

T: My foundation is Nihonga (Japanese Painting) which is an invented tradition of an identical style using water and nikawa washable animal binder. I received my BFA from Nihonga Course at Musashino Art University in 2005. Please allow me to show my Asian heritage in my art and my character as strictly as possible but, I am sorry, it's going to be such a long text.  I cannot explain Asia in my using brushes honestly and Brushstrokes;  touches of painters, like fingerprints, are more personal than national characters or traditions, I think. In my childhood, I was using watercolors and rice glue in normal public elementary school art classes. And still, now, I prefer to use school materials. They are items I was familiar with before I started academic art study.  Academic things like using oil paint were very far from normal Japanese middle-class people although manga was super popular among them, to creative kids too like me. So, water base manga art of mine today was predictable maybe. I could pass the Nihonga art school exam because it had the capability to accept the not academic my artist's character perceiving some cues of a self-taught wild artist symbolizing a side of East Asian culture. While studying in my art university`s Nihonga major, I was soaked in some interesting mood of it which sticks Asia in its slightly conceptual background. The concept and basic techniques of the art genre Nihonga were reportedly established in the Imperial Japan era, from the end of the 19 century to the beginning of the 20 century. Shin Iwa (New Mineral Pigment) is an artifact mineral pigment that was invented about the birth time of Nihonga. Early Nihonga noticeably looks political and it seems to agitate nationalism. So it potentially had the side of propaganda art of that era through which the Japanese army was potent. So Nihonga was, I feel, potentially assigned to be a negotiable and loveable symbolism of both strong Imperial Japan and the concept of the universal brotherhood (八紘一宇). Universal brotherhood was an Imperial Japan's slogan saying that Imperial Japan and many Asian countries are one family and they should become independent and build alliance bonds together in order to fight Western countries` imperialism. So in that result, I think, Nihonga successfully traditionally has essences of Asian ancient art`s deep intelligence which have been shaped through infinite time and its visual mentions Asian culture which peacefully crosses over national boundaries. But, overall, when I became a Nihonga student, my professors were already newer Nihonga painters who debuted after the 60s. Nihonga had already enjoyed the cold war and the financial bubble since the defeat of Imperial Japan and there were already zero aggressive propaganda signs. So my fuzzy information about Nihonga`s origin and ideology is perfectly honest, shallow, and obscured. But at least I experienced symbolic Nihonga traditional assignments. One of them was reproducing old masterpieces such as 鳥獣戯画 (Chōjū-giga) which was made in 12c or 13c. My classmates followed special methods of restoring national treasures in government projects including restoring murals inside of Japanese ancient kings` graves. While carefully copying the rolls whose brush touches are slow and sophisticated, I was literally facing those old rolls` admirable quality which only real classic art pieces must-have. Some awareness and skills I achieved through the experience are still active in my sense of beauty and my technical baseline in my making contemporary paintings. And anything else… My grandfather was a craftsman making and selling traditional symbolic paper bags to be used in a traditional ceremony called Shichigosan (七五三). The inside of the paper bags is very long traditional candies called Chitose Ame (千歳飴). The paper bags traditionally have Nihonga like print on their front side. It was nepotism that had continued their country scale monopoly in that field since the Edo era. My father got a scientist teaching at the Engineering Department at a "Tokyo`s university" so he did not inherit the paper bag business. But, he sometimes took me to my grandfather's house where my aunt and her husband were inheriting the business in Asakusa. So I was witnessing the old-time atmosphere and knowhow of Showa era`s traditional paper bag maker in their using paper behaviors. My father, as a son of the traditional paper bag meister, did not use scissors when he cut paper in his original house. He folded paper like origami and licked the marked line and the paper was easily divided, so I knew the paper materials' beauty.  My Asian family connection is definitely influential in my art that I like to use paper and water.

U:  Do you see yourself wanting to curate more shows in the future?

T:  Yes. I want to be a big artist having more exhibitions in the future. And I want to make better paintings too.  My concern is my stamina today.  I recently learned an anti-aging breathing method, according to a qi master via YouTube, which is to suck air longer than radiating air.

"A Day of Mountain Fires,"2020 14x11 (inches) Acrylic on canvas

U:  What are the differences when staging and preparing a show for your own art and the art of others?

T:  In America, artists usually make bodies of exhibitions while asking others for feedback, and also they hire installers.  I want to follow them but it is not my system. I usually shun people for my taking avoidance of risks. I am serious about extra confusion from my sensitive and complicated process of making paintings. I want to shut out not reliable information that others unconsciously speak. The people might be great but their great comments might be horrible. And I have experience of installer jobs and I honestly desire to design the inside of exhibition spaces like making sculpture or installation art individual projects. But I am an optimistic person basically and socially not so picky, and I like to listen to people actually, especially people knowing that we are living in different realities.

"People I Saw Outside," 2020 47x87 (inches) Acrylic on canvas

U:  What about the human experience found in the face do you wish to recreate in your paintings?

T:  I wish to recreate some gestural and mental junctions with which audiences can access. For example, painted smiling faces make audiences smile and sad faces share a sad mood if the audience has empathy and shadowing ability which is achieved through their life experience. The figures are described from memory, so they are similar to people whom I have met.

U: What if any advantages have you had from being in quarantine in terms of making art?

T: I have seen hope aka positive thinking that finding the best answers converting generally not acceptable situations into welcome able chances. This "stop and rethink '' percolation or infiltration like slow every day is negatively obviously inconvenient and positively subtly noiseless. Untouchable social distance days have painfully paradoxically built touchable bonds like my apartment neighborhood where people help each other in this period of emergency (reportedly, one of three people were affected by Covid-19 here Los Angeles now late January in 2021). For example, some of my neighbors bring and share donated food from churches, and my next-door neighbor working in a warehouse club-style big store delivers toilet paper from his store to my room.  This difficult time could spotlight small subtle respectable things that had been marooned in busy instant plastic days. The snail mail-like speed percolated awareness and surviving good citizens' will and compassion must be crystalized on future classic paintings like historical artists' masterpieces such as Secessionsgebäude`s Beethoven Frieze or Pomona College`s Prometheus.

U: What does a typical day in the studio look like for you?

T: I wake up, eat burritos, make art, and sleep surrounded by tons of piles of my unfinished paintings alone; and I check news and SNS via my cell phone in my bed. I cook original odd foods like curry rice using sour porridge made of sushi rice that my Japanese neighbor gave me. A typical day in my studio looks like a primitive creative caveman`s dramatic survival like a messy inside of a drifting submarine.

“Pineapple, " 2020 20x26 (inches) Acrylic on canvas

 U: How do you use Lines to make ubiquitous statements?

T:  Seeing lines is a permanent mysterious human nature and lines are homing us. I use lines as visible optical illusions bordering physical space and mental space or inside and outside of the brain, or its symbol which also symbolizes the potential ego of human beings too.

U: How has Chicano culture and art influenced your art?

T:  I have met a lot of types of Chicano people from open mic activists to Chicano mural restoration teams in person and they included beautiful graffiti guys. Their grassroots voices filtered through helicopter noise enter my studio through windows and kindly whisper to me. Most of them are individual artists, but they also work as collectives on projects.  A lot of these actual grassroots organizers access my studio and encourage me to protect launching my voice which spreads refined positive qi. 

"Hachidori," 2020 20x26 (inches) Acrylic on canvas

U: Can the creative process be limiting at all? How do you find new outlets in the same medium?

T:  I step out of my comfort zone. For example, my coming new painting series uses tissue paper (toilet paper and baby powder). It is the self simulation of my Japanese university's graduation work paintings that used toilet paper as painting bodies. There are chiefly two difficulties. Tissue paper is easy to melt and it is honestly not beautiful as a painting's body. Honestly, I have done it once after the graduation work. It was immediately after the Fukushima`s nuc incident. I wanted to, by using the ephemeral items dominating our lives in some poetic ways, visualize how weak and leashed the modernized convenient urban lifestyle was. 

My assumption is that my potential creativity and the power of my will can invent a variety of solutions through the concentrated process of overcoming impossible kinds. It may be similar to making a new corona vaccine which uses multi odd materials like cancer cells and takes bunches of clinical trials.

Crystallizing tons of effort and harmonizing the invented colorful solutions would open new possibilities of painting art, and that would be the new and miracle outlets audiences would enjoy.

To find out more about Tomoaki’s work you can find it here.