Hot Coffee with Keiko Narahashi
Keiko Narahashi was born in Tokyo,grew up in South Carolina and made her home in New York.In her ceramic sculptures Narahashi explores a fine line between abstraction and representation, luminosity, harmony and dissonance.She works with ideas of memory and symbolic landscapes.Given her family history of immigration Narahashi is interested in the theme of boundaries, othering,working through traumas. We spoke around Narashashi’s ongoing dual show with Lizzie Scott at Klaus von Nichtssagend gallery on view through February 17,2024.
Nina: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?
Keiko: My favorite spot is my front porch in the summertime in Cape Cod, looking out onto my garden which is a wild mix of native flowers and boulders. Since I transformed it from a flattened, clear-cut yard into a meadow, I see all kinds of creatures bustling about. It’s quite dramatic, actually. It’s all in the service of food gathering. There’s a song sparrow family inside a tight-leaved evergreen (it’s tall and narrow with three tufts on the top and looks like a green castle) - I can only see the little hole where the parents disappear into as they come and go. There are goldfinches, dragonflies, and a billion bees, and overhead the occasional redtail hawk or osprey. Also many hyperactive chipmunks chasing each other, and the little chubby rabbit who squats in one spot for long periods - I worry about its longevity with all the hungry predators about. Anyhow, I am always drinking a coffee, with sugar and milk.
Installation photo, Keiko Narahashi/Lizzie Scott,January 12-February 17,2024.Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery,New York. Photo courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
Nina: Please tell me more about your ongoing dual show with Lizzie Scott at Klaus von Nichtssagend gallery. What prompted this exhibition? What is the underlying idea to bring you two together?
Keiko: I actually met Lizzie over twenty years ago at the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program, and we’ve kept loosely in touch since. It was the people at Klaus, Rob, Ingrid and Sam, who brought us together. They weren’t aware that we knew each other, and they thought our work would create an interesting conversation. It’s one of those wonderful art world serendepities, where the work itself connects you with others.
Keiko Narahashi
Color Plane (with landscape 1), 2023 glazed stoneware
12 × 7 × 17 inches (30.48 × 17.78 × 43.18 cm). Photo courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
Keiko Narahashi
Color Plane (with landscape 2), 2023 glazed stoneware
12 3⁄4 × 8 × 16 1⁄2 inches (32.39 × 20.32 × 41.91 cm).Photo courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
Nina: Could you pick one work currently on view and zero in on it. What is it called? What inflenced you when you were working on it? How does it fit the overall direction of your artistic practice?
Keiko: I’d like to talk about two which are the newest works in the show: Color Plane (with landscape 1) and Color Plane (with landscape 2). I’ve been making the Color Plane works for a while. They are based on a simple structure of two intersecting planes. Some are purely abstract explorations of color and shape, others are symbolic landscapes, and many are somewhere in between. Since the construction is so simple, it frees me to work more directly with color. I think a lot about glaze and paint, and the elemental differences between them.
These two pieces are a departure from my other Color Planes in that I focused on the “back” piece, which had always operated like a kickstand in the past. I brought it forward, and it became an undulating mountainscape, like a Japanese screen. The perpendicular arch then becomes this abstracted shape that imposes a human framework, like architecture. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways that people interact with nature, and in my mind, these two pieces are a literal intersection of the two.
Keiko Narahashi Moonface, 2023
glazed stoneware
13 × 19 1⁄2 × 7 inches (33.02 × 49.53 × 17.78 cm).Photo courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
Nina: As we have previously discussed during a studio visit a few years back the theme of memory, painful historical transformation is of importance to you. How do you see them affecting your methods, materials, forms and thoughs as you work?
Keiko: My experience as an immigrant, the only Asian person in my entire school, growing up in the American south during desegregation was formative to say the least. Of equal importance was my late parents’ histories of coming of age during World War II in Japan and their own childhood family traumas. Neither of my parents ever talked about the war, and I only recently learned about my father’s experiences from a memoir written by my uncle.
As I grow older I’ve become increasingly aware of the imact of the war on their families and the subsequent traumas suffered particularly by their fathers who were stripped of their patriarchal roles. I think my sense of absurdity arises from this legacy.
My own experience growing up as an ‘other’ is more visible to me. One piece in the show, Moonface, is a direct expression of a childhood memory of another child telling me that I had a flat face because I was ‘Oriental’. I think it was the first time that I saw myself from outside and became aware of being categorized and differentiated, of being compared and found wanting. I think my interest in physiognomy stems from this moment.
Installation photo, Keiko Narahashi/Lizzie Scott,January 12-February 17,2024.Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery,New York. Photo courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
Nina: Your sculptures verge on abstraction. What do you think about the history of abstract art and where it is going now? Did it change over time?
Keiko: I don’t really see any dichotomy between abstraction and — everything else. To me, all art is simultaneously an abstraction and a potential inroad to one’s heart.That said, the introduction of the figure into my work was a huge shift for me, as was working in the round as opposed to planes. I think there was a certain amount of hiding, or indirectness, that I employed. It’s harder to maintain that with a sculpture of an actual head! I’ve never liked working from life because I prefer the openness of working from memory or some emotional pull. I like that transformation which allows for indirect associations. In some ways, the beauty of abstraction is that the viewer can experience something both unique to them, and universal.