A detail is shown from "Natsu No Kase (Summer Breeze)" by Sush Machida, part of Ghost Dogs: Japanese-American Legends, in the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at UNLV Monday, Sept. 22, 2014. The exhibit closes Saturday, Sept. 27.
In the 1980s Japanese-American artist Masami Teraoka addressed the AIDS crisis in ukiyo-e works, portraying geishas with condoms and creating large-scale portraits of a mother and a father with a child. The works in all their beauty are alarming, but Teraoka is an artist who directly addresses contemporary political and social issues in traditional Japanese-style paintings. His McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan series looked at “fast food homogenizing world tastes.” More recently, he’s addressed the Catholic Church sex scandals in ornate, graphic Renaissance-meets-ukiyo-e-style works.
Meanwhile, Japanese-American artist Patrick Nagatani has combined contemporary topics with his personal cultural history, whether it’s his haunting photographs in Japanese-American Concentration Camps 50 years after their closing (including two camps of his parents’ internment) or the effects of the nuclear industry in New Mexico.
Influential, trailblazing and now in their 60s and 70s, both artists have earned legend status, says Sush Machida, who brought them together for Ghost Dogs: Japanese-American Legends, which ends September 27 at UNLV’s Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery.
The Machida-curated exhibit also includes Machida’s own artwork, which at first seems an unusual combination given the weighted issues in Teraoka's and Nagatani’s, until you consider that Machida, also a Japanese-American artist, double-majored in environmental studies and art, eventually merging the two into a career built on visually bright, hard-edged Japanese paintings, minimal and with exactitude. Rather than an overt statement on environmental damage, Machida paints the beauty in nature, he says, making “a suggestion, not a statement.”
The commonality between them extends beyond the East-meets-West art elements and into the powerful commentary within the work, whether it's Teraoka’s geishas exploring the issues with condoms and packaging in a time where protection is essential, or Nagatani’s collage works from his Novellas series that focus on power, violence and greed through repetition of dismembered body parts of body builders-- placed among pop-culture images of beauty (Japanese and Western). The body parts at times are collaged into gory imagery.
Contrasting all of that are Machida’s vibrant Japanese-inspired renderings of waves (“Morning Delight,” 2012) and animals (“Summer Breeze,” “Gone Fishin’”).
Machida says he titled the show based on the artists’ current stature in the art world: “These two are underrated today because the content for the art world is different. It’s about money. It’s about fame. It’s not about art. And so it's Ghost Dogs because good art is sometimes invisible for many people."
Ghost Dogs: Japanese-American Legends Through September 27; Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, noon-5 p.m.; free. Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, 702-895-3893.
