YOSHITOMO SAITO
yoshitomosaito.com

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  ARTIST STATEMENT 2008  

Moving to Colorado was one of the best things I’ve done to my life as an artist.
Rocky Mountains are so big and high to make my ego smaller I assume, to a healthier size. The monumental beauty of Rockies is so magnificent that it magnifies the fact that I’ve overrated my art and other things in contemporary life. Nevertheless, I continue my object making (because that’s all I’m capable of), and since I got here, I’ve worked like a beetle. (Funny I look like a beetle when I cover my face with a welding mask or face shield.)

Bearing insect like animal instinct, I gather debris from nature into my first ever-private foundry. In the result of studio work, some get a form of cocoon and some capture a landscape image. Others are constellations of symbolic unity with memories.

Ensemble of them reintroduces an earth-connected poetry in my alloy again.
 
BRONZE CANVAS
 

The canvas image (for my sculpture in bronze) came to me in early 2004 when I saw images of monochrome paintings by my fellow Haines Gallery artist Mr. David Simpson of San Francisco. I was impressed by the luxurious yet deliciously stoic presence of his work. His effort to bring the metallic surface to his paintings was impeccable. I even learned that he titled some of his work with names that related to bronze patina. Amused, I immediately started to think about creating sculptural bronze canvases to do the reverse.

An inexpensive readymade canvas from the local craft store and the handmade canvas by a student painter were picked first. I chose them because they both had a sense of intimacy yet possessed a tight surface tension because of their smaller scale. Simplicity in idea and appearance of this new series however led me to think about other kind of tension that comments on the fundamental issue of object making and its contradictory nature in the context of contemporary art dialogue. Though many of my work have some personal cultural implications to start with, this bronze canvas series contains many aspects of art historical attitudes beneath. It suggests the coexistence of Realism, Abstract expressionism, Pop art, Minimalism, Post Minimal Process Art, Appropriation, and other conceptual approaches. The canvas in my work is what it is and it is not.

  
   
  108 BLUE CRANES, 2005  
  One hundred and eight bronze canvases compose this single work. The number "108" comes from the Japanese Buddhist tradition of hitting a bronze bell 108 times on New Year's Eve to chase away the bad spirits of the ending year, and to receive the new year in pure spirit. "Blue Cranes" is two-fold - it rhymes with my favorite jazz album "Blue Train" by John Coltrane. (His interest in spirituality and peace as an artist was quite admirable.) Cranes became a central symbol for peace in Japan following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Collection of paper cranes is sculptural wish for others' good luck, health and happiness. (The idea of compassion)

For eight months in 2005, I repeated one hundred and eight times exactly the same process in my studio as if I were folding paper to make origami cranes after cranes after cranes. This time consuming repetition made me feel bit like a Buddhist monk in a training session in Kyoto. Albeit naïve (and I’m not really a Buddhist), “108 Blue Cranes” is the work inspired by my own thoughts and wishes for peace and happiness for everyone on the planet Earth.		  
   
  OTHER BRONZE CANVASES  
 

The newest bronze canvas pieces deal with the idea of copying in a twisted manner. First I buy imitation paintings (of, for instance, Van Gogh) at the local shopping mall and yield the flexible molds from them. Then I turn those original-imitation-paintings into the original bronze reality. One might see the traces of painterly surface taking a secret breath in stillness. Instinctively I find viability for visual poetry in this arena.

Faking and lying are an interesting trait of the animal kingdom to me. From virus to fish to insect to bird to reptile to human being, I see this deceit all over generally as a means of survival. While I dislike deception, I find the language of ‘faking artistic’ thought provoking as a theme in sculpture.

Fall 2006
Denver, CO

  
   
  You never copy the glass on the table; you copy the residue of a vision…. Each time I look at the glass, it has an air of re-making itself….it really always is in between being and not being. And it’s that that one wants to copy.
- Alberto Giacometti