A letter to the artist, Chiura Obata
Dear Obata-sensei,
Time moves slowly in museums. There, the eons pass quickly from gallery to gallery: bones reshaped from dust, fossils pantomime geological dramas, the world in past tense reduced to human scale. I have often found myself pacing museum floors--restless--first clockwise then counterclockwise, my feet circling rooms in widening whirlpools, urging my eyes to absorb as much as possible to understand my place in the world. My place in time. What it means to bear witness; to be an outsider allowed only a glance from afar. One can get tired of simply looking. You can grow numb even to beauty when you can’t touch it.
In many ways, museums are cemeteries for lost time: the things we invented, the ideas we died for, and the people we’ve been to each other, both terrible and tender. What is forgotten in museums or stolen from our memories exists out of time, in non-time, that infinite void; a place only for gods and immortals, which we are not. This is how, for a long time, I thought that Asian Art was merely a facet of the classical world of antiquities and conquered empires. Every museum had a trophy room of religious and royal artworks pried from the gilded ruins of fallen temples and gutted palaces. I, no one in particular, was therefore born an artist hundreds of years too late.
This is why I stood transfixed before your painting, “Mother Earth,” one damp and drizzly spring evening in 2007 at the de Young in San Francisco. You took a stand to prove that Asian Artists are always evolving and relevant. Always present.
It was a modern composition of your wife, Haruko, standing among a fortress of redwood trees. Her skin was translucent and glowing, and the apricot blush of her nipples peeked through the inky waterfalls of her long hair cascading over her shoulders. She stood barefoot among tiny wildflowers, her rounded belly swelling with your firstborn child, and the setting sun behind her bathed the sky in copper rust. It was the first time that I had seen something modern painted using traditional techniques. My lover at the time remarked that we looked the same, your wife and me, and he posed me like her in front of your painting with my eyes downcast and turned to the side. As he took my photo, I thought to myself, “The paintbrush against the cloth is like the hand of the artist caressing his love endlessly.”
I remember thinking you must have loved your wife deeply to have painted her again and again, willing that reckless ink to conform to her lovely shape as you coaxed her skin to emerge from raw silk. Silk: that fickle canvas that rebukes the artist’s hand. Ink, like water, flowing wherever there is gravity. You painted Haruko in 1912, and she is ripe and pink like a split peach. I have seen paintings of women painted without love, and their eyes glitter with flint; full of mutual distrust and boredom. In “Mother Earth,” Haruko looks away. What was she thinking about? You reworked this painting for your first American show in 1928 and rechristened it “Dusk in the High Sierras,” and thus made Haruko immortal. That is what artists do: we make museums of our lives.
Did you ever paint Haruko again, like this, after that awful year when the world tried to break you? After your neighbors shot bullets into your store on Telegraph Avenue after Pearl Harbor, not caring at all that you only sold art supplies and ikebana classes? After you sold everything to create a scholarship for students suffering the most from war?
Did you see the wilderness with new eyes when you were cast out into it like Cain? Did your voice change as your eyes adjusted to that desert sun that bleaches everything bone white? I wished I could ask you then, standing before her--Haruko. If you had painted her again, after that horrible year, would she have gazed back instead?
I found my answers two year later, after my lover had flown from me like a bird in winter, in the same museum where you had laid down your proofs: You had sketched your days, hundreds of them, on anything you could find: squares of paper, napkins, pieces of linoleum, a torn corner of a cotton dress. I reached into my own pocket and found an old napkin, nut brown, with my own ink-blotted notes: a column of words, a half-scrawled poem for him. Do all artists do this--build an oeuvre over a lifetime using the scraps of our lives?
My eyes traveled with yours to the horse stables in Tanforan, to the snipers standing guard along barbed-wire fences in Topaz, to the quiet house in St. Louis, Missouri. I thought of my own parents’ journey from the refugee camps in Thailand to cramped shared quarters in Hilo, Salem, and Merced. The small house in Fresno with the narrow-eyed neighbors.
Your photo surprised me: I did not expect those eyes. Perhaps I expected to see my own gazing back at me. And now, I am an artist, too, and I have chosen to be the one who remembers. I write and I draw my days, documenting the pains and the victories, because I want to tell it right. I want to be prolific, like you. A maestra of my own life.
I used to think that ordinary moments like pouring a glass of water into a chipped glass, reading a book, and cooking meals were too small to be written down but, through you, I learned that context matters more. These ordinary moments anchor us most during absurd times. Forced incarceration. Family separations. Political exile. I love this life too much to not return to it, again and again, massaging it by adding some new details with the ink of my memories. I am too tethered to the silken days that buckle against my wishful thinking. I want to tame my own wildness inside book-shaped cages.
That portrait of me standing before Haruko? God knows where that has gone. Perhaps it is hidden deep within a drawer, or burned to ash. Besides, I am too changed to be sentimental: That girl in the photo and the world she lived in is long gone. That lover’s eyes now sag, and his hair has thinned and gone gray. He has another life now, and so do I. Tant pis.
I think I would like a new photograph, though, one in which I am most myself at this moment--still defiant. I am bored of beautiful women with perfect white teeth who have nothing clever to say, and especially bored of women who are merely decorative. I want the black armor of my words to flow from these lips, and for my eyes to flame with dreams in an animal tongue. I want to say, Here is the mirror I searched for: I polished it from my own bones.
I want to reach across the arrow of time through my art and bite someone’s heart so hard that they awaken to themselves.
I want my words to thrust deep roots into someone’s body so that rare-colored blossoms sprout from their skin the next morning. I want the kind of love that takes a painter sixteen years to become whole; the kind of art that survives war, oppression, hatred, and exile; the kind of life that continues speaking to you even after death. I want, I want, I want.
I want to say, Here I am. And, Here I was. Will you feel me crossing time to witness you, too?
I will, if I can master this.
Your student in spirit,
Lisa Lee Herrick