Comme des Garcons #20 - fall 2008 - Risa Fukui

Risa Fukui Interview with Wakana Kawahito

Risa Fukui is one of the up-and-coming Kirie artists who creates a picture by cutting lines to make new space in a piece of paper. Kirie is a traditional Japanese craft technique, making a picture by cutting both white and black paper and putting color paper between space.

KI RI GA is a name of Risa's first book launching this November.

Q:I heard you learned Kirie when you joined a Kirie club at your junior high school but you stopped doing kirie after that. Why did you restart creating Kirie when you were in art school?

A:I had majored in Graphic Design at Tama Art University. At that time, graphic design was more analog; for example, using color papers to think of pattern, dividing a face to make a construction of color and drawing a line by hand. Paper was a comfortable material for me. In my sophomore year, I had homework in class to create works by any kind of technique I wanted. At that time, using paper reminded me I was good at making Kirie. A lot of my classmates were superior to me in terms of drawing and painting watercolors, and I was trying to find my own style. Then, I tried Kirie and it was really fun and worked out. I have been making Kirie since then.

Q:How long does it take time to create a work?

A:For example, I am making one A3 and one A4 white and black works per week for weekly magazine. It is actually hard. If it is necessary to put colors, it will take more. I usually need two or three weeks to create a piece of work.

Q:What kind of Kirie are you looking for?

A:I am interested in bringing active element and movement within flat and silence space of Kirie. It is essential to cut a line for Kirie. I think that my originality is in organic and vivid lines. It is most important that my work be is full of strength and vitality.

Q:What inspires you?

A:I am interested in something alive such as plants and animals, and things that move like smoke. Additionally, my imagination is ignited by invisible things. For example, music from the drums.

Risa Fukui Blog: http://artgene.blog.ocn.ne.jp/fukui/

Comme des Garcons #20 - fall 2008 - Mondongo

New Selections from Comme des Garcons Fall Winter collections 2008 have arrived.

"In Spanish, the word “mondongo” means tripe, or the lining of a cow’s stomach. The word “Mondongo” is also a stew we love, and we are like three witches stirring it up in a cauldron: revolving and expecting and trying and experimenting; attempting to alchemize, to distill, and ooze all the chaos, and the all possible “all-ness” in it . . . " — Mondongo, 2008 (from the Mondongo Manifesto)

Mondongo is the internationally recognized Argentine artist collective comprised of Juliana Laffitte, Manuel Mendanha, and Agustina Picasso. In their transgressive yet celebratory work, Mondongo explore the mystery and depth of the human psyche as a way to break through chaos to creativity and unfettered imagination.

In Mondongo’s world all is up for deconstructive terrorism—the miserable ambitions of the ego, social hypocrisy, the slight satisfactions of sex, what’s left of the family, the murderous ideology of a victim satiated world.

The amount of work Mondongo put into each piece is extensive, and both intricate and beautiful. They are literally paintings without paint—using such materials as thread, beads, plasticine, cookies, and glitter, to name of few. Production is slow and deliberate as the material and concept are intricately jelled: the materials used as metaphorical adjuncts to the concepts.

As critic and author Kevin Power comments in his essay, “Mondongoing the World,”

Mondongo’s work is a dark vision but not a moralistic one. They are
laconic commentators who like the rest of us have taken about as much as they can and who seethe inside but without burning up their energies since there is a long day ahead. All of us need to find the measures of his or her own dance, stretch out in time, fill the curve, smile. There is an ethical positioning but no attempt at facile solutions, no belief structure to hold on to, and as a result the work becomes even more desperate, and often the vomit surges up and explodes as a calculated image, suspended in time, but ready to melt or quickly consumed like everything else, yet at that last minute it twists away and sticks in the mind.

Formed in 1999, Mondongo have since earned their particular place in the ebullience of Argentinean art: an iconoclastic, punk, imaginatively inventive, sharply particular, personal, laid-back look at life—a “do what you like” situation from a ground zero world loaded with elements from a grotesque farce.