- Aiko Hachisuka Hard in the Paint
Aiko Hachisuka (b. 1974, Nagoya) uses a mixture of old and new garments in her artwork, sewing them together in the forms of sculpted paintings or free-standing barrel-like masses. As seen in Hard in the Paint (2011), Hachisuka's work is voluminous and simultaneously amorphous because her layering of hues, patterns, and shapes suggests movement. Furthermore, as these garments are individually stuffed, body shapes gradually emerge through abstract impressions. These bodies, losing and regaining forms, make the work more vibrant although they are tightly linked and sewn, in this case, onto a cylindrical core.
During her high school years, Hachisuka relocated from Nagoya, Japan, to Pensacola, Florida as an exchange student. She later received foundational art education at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. She then earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) under the mentorship of Charles Gaines, whose art integrates conceptualism and racial politics in his careful line and color grids that retain a textile-like quality. Moreover, CalArts is known for its Feminist Art Program, which was launched in 1971. One of the first of its kind in the United States, the program was operated by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, the latter a major proponent of the Pattern and Decoration movement. In a sense, Hachisuka is a brainchild of the movement, which brought ornamental and craft aesthetics to the critical, political, and artistic forefront, and other CalArts cohorts whose work conflated conceptualism and the everyday.
Although her practice is deeply grounded in the Los Angeles art scene, Hachisuka is also influenced by childhood memories, especially those of her grandmother's routine sewing work.1 Like many women of her generation, the artist's grandmother repaired her family's clothes as they became worn, recycling them when they were beyond repair. Hachisuka found it captivating to observe how tattered clothes were made into vibrant rugs or other small items, constituting a type of family album that simultaneously [End Page 176] transformed the familiar to the unfamiliar by hand. What equally mesmerized young Hachisuka was her grandmother's focus on producing minor, disposable goods with diligent needlework. As Hachisuka explains, this activity provided a way for her grandmother to weave together her own meditative, even sanctified, spaces within the everyday.2 The artist attempts to similarly refabricate items with her own meticulous artistic procedures.
Indeed, Hachisuka's creations involve something akin to domestic work and compassionate care in her scavenging, inspecting, washing, and mending. Her scheme, however, may also be wild, or even violent, when pulling, puffing up, and pushing on these garments. In between these processes, she silk-screens them to apply colors—unique shades the artist mixes to print on one clothing item at a time. Color never comes out evenly on folded, crumbled, and textured clothes. Thus, the result is a unique assortment of polychrome abstract patterns layered over the disintegrated designs and shapes of the garments themselves. Each completed work is a collage in which fine-art techniques convene: sculpture, print, painting, and even handicraft are the new bodies brought to the garments.3 Nevertheless, these bodies are fragmented and anonymous; they obscure the wearers' memories as well as gender and other social constraints often associated with clothes. The sense of amorphousness and dynamism Hachisuka's art exudes is not only a visual effect of color, pattern, and form but also the result of her working in the in-betweens of technique and practice, including that of cultures and systems.
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Rika Hiro is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Scripps College, California. Her doctoral dissertation looked at the aftereffects of the atomic bombs in arts and exhibition culture in postwar Japan. She co-founded the non-profit art space Art2102 of Los Angeles and co-curated Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950–1970 and Radical...