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24 June , 2002

ART FROM THE HEART

When Junko Chodos was a child growing up in post-war Japan, she was made to feel ashamed of her art.

"So many people are repressed in Japan - my art showed them there is something else, that you can be honest to yourself and live courageously."

Instead of expressing her creativity visually, her strict parents insisted she join her sisters and become a pianist. But she studied art on her own, drawing secretly at night and hiding her sketches. Her work also evolved in an individualistic way, affected by the death and destruction she had seen during the war, when Tokyo was brutally firebombed. But in art classes at school, she painted in traditional styles, smothering her own expression.

By the time she went to college, she was on an art track, despite family misgivings. She studied art history and the philosophy of art at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo. By then Chodos realized she would not be able to express herself honestly within Japanese society. She left Japan behind for gradate school in America. She became a naturalized US citizen in 1988.

Chodos' powerful, abstract work will be on display at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in an exhibition titled "Passionate Witness" that opens with a reception Friday, June 28 from 6-9 pm, through Aug. 31.

In the years since she arrived in the US, Chodos' creativity has been unleashed, and her work has evolved into a powerful body of expressionism - abstract imagery both large and small, which often use very exact representational objects from nature, or details of machinery, as visual elements.

Whether the art features finely-rendered tangles of roots ("Root Series") that has the expressionist power of a Jackson Pollock "drip" painting, or a gestural swath of paint-laden brush ("Emerging Consciousness" series) that follows the German expressionism, Chodos' artwork is always both very abstract and very nature-based at the same time.

She says her fascination with nature in an abstract context comes from her cultural roots.

"More and more I realize that I guess it's because it's based in Japanese culture that my art is based in nature," she says from her home in California. "My background in expressionistic forms are very compatible with nature forms." Her interest in nature has even led to her doing flower arranging, or ikebana - but an abstract form, some of which will be in display in Boulder.

Although in a sense she had to turn her back on Japan to become an artist, she is still very connected to Japanese culture. "I have a very strong Japanese background and am very emotionally attached to it. It's always a polarized power - pulling in two different directions," she says.

Language was the most extreme: "I had to conquer a lot of shyness to speak in English. I feel very tight and uncomfortable speaking in English, and of course I am very comfortable talking in Japanese. Half of my books are in English and half in Japanese."

Still, when she arrived in the US she was determined to become an American. "I had a strong feeling that I would not go to back to Japan. My family did not know. Gradually, they stopped asking 'why don't you come back to Japan.' Now I feel my own life is here."

Her first exhibit in Japan after achieving success in America was "a key emotional experience," she recalls. "About 200 people came every day, holding a story that one of the nationwide newspapers did about me, and it was almost like they were studying me."

But the reason wasn't her art. "The article was very much talking about me as a woman - in those days it was very unusual for a woman to be divorced (she had been married before she came to the US). So many women came and cried for me, and told me that they couldn't stand their marriages. It was like a therapy session. But they understood that this art was something that made me strong."

The experience proved to her that emigrating was the right thing to do. "So many people are repressed in Japan - my art showed them there is something else, that you can be honest to yourself and live courageously."

This concept isn't native to Japanese culture, she points out. In the US, of course, it's taken for granted. "The first premise for an American artist is the freedom of personal expression."

Despite the abstraction and sometimes-grotesque elements in her work (one series revolved around the image of a decapitated bird she found), Chodos' work is inviting, not alienating. She understands that contemporary art has pushed away people who may not be schooled in the intellectual aspects of modern art.

"Art is a very strange thing, a very strange expression," she admits.

But she has always found that her work resonates with "regular" folks. "When I had a show in Osaka, some of my art was displayed in a window. There were workers digging up the street, and when I went to the gallery, all of them put their heads on the glass of the window to see my art. Since then I've noticed that when I am working in my studio, (contractors) who are working on my home are the best viewers of my art. They don't know what it is but they are attracted to it.

Many people are afraid of contemporary art because they feel they have to understand it, but these workers just look at it and I feel there is something here that reaches them. They don't have to understand it."

Hopefully, anyone who sees her exhibit in Boulder will walk away with an appreciation for Chodos' creative spirit - an American expression rooted in her Japanese ancestry - and for "modern" art that is timeless. She's a Japanese woman who found her voice the hard way, and we're lucky that she is here to share it with us.

Junko Chodos: A Passionate Witness, June 28-Aug. 31, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th St., Boulder, 303-443-2122. Opening reception with the artist 6-9 pm Fri. June 28. You can read more about Junko Chodos at her Web site.