04.01.2010
Artist takes aim at Japan's hip hop culture
By Dorothy Shin, Akron Beacon Journal Art and Architecture Critic
When I was in high school, a small dress size for a senior of average height was a 6.
A few years ago,I began reading that girls of a similar age and build think they're fat unless they're a size 2.
This may seem like an odd way to begin consideration of the work of the American black artist iona rozeal brown, but one of the aims of brown's work on view at the Museum of Modern Contemporary Art (MOCA) Cleveland is to examine the pressures and obstacles facing young women today, especially, but not necessarily limited to,young black women.
The exhibit, iona rozeal brown: all falls down, was organized by MOCA Cleveland and curated by Megan Lykins Reich, director of education and associate curator.
It features 15 visually captivating and conceptually profound figurative paintings ranging in tone from teasing and whimsical to raw and unsettling, showing her take on Japanese hip-hop culture and its appropriation of blackface.
The exhibit received the 2009 Joyce Award in Visual Art given by the Joyce Foundation in Chicago to support new commissions for artists of color. MOCA is publishing a catalog on the exhibit in April.
As part of the award, MOCA commissioned brown to create new paintings based in part on Japanese Ukiyo-e prints from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as to complete a residency with area high school students.
In working with the students, Reich said, brown empowered them and gave them a sense of ownership of the screen and mural they helped create.
''She was great with the students,'' Reich said. ''There was a vibrancy in their relationship. When she gave her talk at the opening, about 240 people showed up. They literally packed the commons area and gave a standing ovation and cheers for her and the students.''
The MOCA Cleveland exhibition is brown's first Midwest solo museum show and the first museum presentation of her new work.
Area museum visitors may recall that the Akron Art Museum's exhibit, Pattern ID, contains work by brown. But that work is from her earlier series, according to Reich, while the paintings at MOCA are from a new body of work.
''The new work is a decisive split from the old,'' Reich said. ''The old work was a questioning of the relationship between black hip-hop culture and Japanese ganguro culture.
''But in this new work, we are showing a connection to the Ukiyo-e prints she examined at Oberlin with an added layer of hip-hop culture.''
In other words, brown's attitude is almost reversed, from antagonistic to inclusive, from dissecting to enhancing.
In this new work, brown takes a page from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and creates a ''journey of the hero[ine]'' narrative, filled with complex characters and enterprising allegory.
To do that, she has turned Japanese visual culture on its head, presenting its best-known and beloved images in blackface.
Japan is one of the most hidebound of contemporary cultures. Even though it's quite Westernized in terms of dress, pastimes, technology and corporate culture, that aspect of its society is essentially window dressing. At its heart, Japan clings to many traditional ways, such as the dominance of the group and the wide difference in freedom and opportunity offered men at the expense of women, particularly young women.
After earning her graduate degree from Yale University in 2002, brown attracted much attention with her signature a3 series (short for afro-asiatic allegories) — also called the blackface paintings — that examine the Japanese appropriation of African-American hip-hop culture.
Brown had read a Transitions magazine article about a Japanese fad in the 1990s, mostly among teenage girls, called ganguro. Its adherents wore exaggerated hairstyles and dark and excessive makeup styled to mimic hip-hop stars like Lil' Kim.
At first, brown resented that the Japanese teens had merely copied the look of hip-hop without trying to understand the contemporary American black culture on which it's based. Moreover, she discovered, they couldn't have cared less about black culture.
Brown's first creative reaction was to even the score by applying blackface motifs and hip-hop styles to the best-known and most traditional Japanese artistic genre, Ukiyo-e prints.
Nearly all these early works, the a3 paintings, make use of two visual codes: Ukiyo-e characters (geishas, samurais, Kabuki actors) are depicted in hip-hop garb; and their white skin is partially covered with brown paint in a nontraditional blackface style that resembles geisha makeup.
In doing this, brown revealed her ambivalence toward cross-cultural sharing and her issues concerning identity and authenticity.
Then she began to realize that this seemingly shallow attempt to emulate the style by Japanese teenage girls was in many ways a rebellion against their traditional culture and a way of establishing unique, more powerful and aggressive identities.
So brown shifted the emphasis in her work, from parody to mythology, by creating a story line about a heroine's journey.
Three archetypal characters — Ana Mei, E.I.N. and Yoshi — are at the core of brown's mythology, and each plays a critical and symbolic role in her new series.
Yoshi is a particularly resonant character. A scrappy gal with style and gumption, Yoshi is an enlightened warrior who communicates with divine spirits but remains in the earthly realm to guide young mortal spirits known as saplings.
Paintings like King Kata #3: peel out (after Yoshitoshi's ''Incomparable Warriors: Woman Han Gaku'') (2007) provide a sense of Yoshi's personality.
Sporting sunglasses and a massive Afro, and looking ''bad'' on her Big Wheel with her hip-hop slang cape behind her and a curling sneer on her lips, Yoshi is a strong woman who not only knows herself, but also suffers neither fools nor the frivolous.
Embodying qualities such as confidence, courage, sincerity and commitment that brown hopes to inspire in young people, Yoshi became the main character featured in brown's community outreach residency project at MOCA Cleveland.
For this series, brown has created a new world, with a reincarnation narrative that occasionally drifts from its Ukiyo-e aesthetic into that of manga, the graphic style of Japanese comics.
Her story line consists of a metaphysical realm where spirits wait in line for assignment. When they receive their purpose, they enter a pod that transports them to an earthly realm, HEZ (human enterprize zone). While in transit, the pods enter a womblike environment for incubation. Once developed, the spirits are sent to HEZ, where they're born as saplings and raised by caretakers. When the saplings die, they return to the spiritual realm for reassignment.
While in HEZ, saplings encounter villains who use materialism and sex to coax them away from their principles and purpose. But deities send warriors to help them find the right path.
Once brown's narrative is explained, it's not difficult to see the analogies between her imagined world and our own and to realize her purpose is to awaken us, particularly young people, to the pressures and choices in life.
''In one of the newest paintings, Yoshi wears this really dainty purple dress, but then she also has motorcycle boots,'' Reich said. ''It's a metaphor for how young people are really sampling it all online, through the media and everything.
''It's a form of androgyny for certain. The villains in her work all wear elaborate weaves, while all the warriors wear natural black hair, and many of the deities are very large, voluptuous women.
''Yoshi, the warrior, wears both pants and a dress. In some ways, she's trying to counter the fashion industry's dictate that young girls have to look a certain way by showing that those are very superficial concerns.
''She puts it in the work, but she doesn't beat you over the head with it. It's subtle and layered within this deep, beautiful narrative.''
Reich said brown went to Japan to research the ganguro culture and came away enlightened.
''Being an American black woman in Japan was a revelation for her,'' Reich said. ''She definitely felt different in her physical appearance, and that helped focus her drive to paint about physical beauty and that there are more important qualities to celebrate than your hair or that you own the latest bag.''
Or, hopefully, whether you starve yourself into a size 2.
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