Naomi Reis and Alex Paik discuss childhood survival mechanisms manifesting in their work, in-between-ness, their labor-intensive practices, and Naomi’s recent body of work which was shown at Transmitter (Brooklyn, NY).
Alex Paik (AP):
You’ve been thinking about camouflage in an ongoing series of your work, and it strikes me that this idea of hiding and/or being invisible is central to your work. Now that I think of it, even your work in grad school, which was about these sort of hybrid utopic (or dystopic) architectures had this silence in them. There were no figures and no real record of anyone having lived or living in those imagined spaces, like they were erased or hidden. When you started talking about camouflage in recent years it really was an a-ha moment for me in understanding your work. I’d love to hear your thoughts more on the invisibility of Asians in general in the art world and the ways in which that feeling might be a part of your work.
Naomi Kawanishi Reis (NR):
Camouflage was something I started using about eight years ago, in a series called Borrowed Landscape. The series was based on photographs I took in the tropical biomes of conservatory gardens, a take on landscape painting where the “nature” being depicted was a highly curated by-product of Western colonialism. Plants that were highly useful/exploitable/profitable/exotic and beautiful, collected in a place that existed outside of time, secreted away from the effects of weather and death. I translated those photographs onto printed wallpaper, upon which was placed a framed mixed-media painting that replicated a portion of the wallpaper behind it.
NR:
I was thinking about how landscape has been used in image-making throughout history to depict idealized places—like Pure Land paradise in Buddhist mandalas, the Taoist spiritualism of Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings, and the glorification of nature found in Romantic landscape paintings.
The title “Borrowed Landscape” comes from a 7th-century Chinese garden design concept (shakkei=借景, a technique of “borrowing” the view of a distant scenic element, like a mountain or lake, into the design of the garden), which felt like a fitting title for where we find ourselves today in relation to landscape. Living on borrowed time, on stolen land: ignoring the reality of our responsibilities to the land, the indigenous people it was stolen from, and the debt owed to stolen Black bodies and labor in service of white supremacy. The handmade framed painting, I suppose, is a stand-in for us as immigrant settlers on this land here in America; we’ve camouflaged ourselves into our surroundings to fit in, to survive. The land we are attempting to fit into, is itself “borrowed” (aka stolen).
These choices weren’t made consciously when I started the series; it’s only now eight years in that I’m beginning to understand the why, and finding the words to explain it. As a diasporic, racialized person both in America as well as in Japan, I’ve needed to navigate complex social and racial situations. My father’s side of the family is white and doesn’t speak Japanese, so as a kid I knew that in order to survive and be “liked” by that side, or maybe even just to be understood, I needed to downplay my otherness and be as “normal,” aka white English-speaking, to them as possible. Conversely, my mom’s side of the family is Japanese and doesn’t speak English, so to them I needed to be as Japanese as possible. Of course as a kid you get a pass to a degree and are loved anyways, but I do remember this feeling of anxiousness, that my survival and ability to be loved and cared for depended on this ability to code-switch...
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