LA MANDALA
2023, Mixed Media, 314 in x 102 in (consists of 4 panels)
797.56 cm × 259.08cm（4枚のパネルで構成）
LA MANDALA reimagines the traditional Buddhist mandala through the cultural, historical, and spiritual landscape of Los Angeles. Bringing together multiple visual languages, the work explores the city as a place where diverse histories, beliefs, and communities intersect, presenting the mandala as a living structure rather than a fixed icon.
A critical essay by art historian and curator Meher McArthur is also available below.↓
LA MANDALA 羅曼荼羅は、ロサンゼルスという都市が持つ文化、歴史、精神性を通して、仏教の曼荼羅を現代的に再解釈した作品です。多様な文化や信仰、記憶が交わる都市を、一つの「生きた曼荼羅」として捉え、固定された図像ではなく、現在も変化し続ける構造として描いています。
ページ後半では、美術史家・キュレーター Meher McArthur による《LA MANDALA》の批評もご覧いただけます。↓
Artist’s Statement on LA MANDALA
LA MANDALA was created through the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs’ COLA Individual Master Artist Project 2023. The work began from my desire to create a contemporary form of spiritual painting in Los Angeles — a city where many cultures, histories, belief systems, and visual languages coexist, collide, and transform.
A mandala can be understood as a map of the universe. In this work, I translate part of that structure into the visual and cultural space of Los Angeles. The painting brings together sacred imagery, abstraction, urban experience, personal marks, and layered systems of meaning. Rather than presenting tradition as something fixed, I approach it as a living language: something to inherit, break open, and carry forward.
For me, LA MANDALA is not only an image to look at, but a field of relationships. It is a place where different forms of memory, protection, chaos, beauty, and reverence can exist together without needing to become one explanation.
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LA MANDALAは、ロサンゼルス市文化局によるCOLA Individual Master Artist Project 2023の受賞作品の一環として制作されました。この作品は、多様な文化、歴史、信仰体系、視覚言語が共存し、衝突し、変化し続ける都市ロサンゼルにおいて、現代の精神的絵画を生み出したいという思いから始まりました。
曼荼羅は、宇宙を表す地図として捉えることができます。本作では、その構造の一部を、ロサンゼルスの視覚的・文化的空間へと置き換えています。画面には、宗教的図像、抽象表現、都市での経験、個人的な痕跡、そして幾層にも重なる意味の体系が共存しています。
私は伝統を固定されたものとして提示するのではなく、生きた言語として捉えています。それは、受け継ぎ、解きほぐし、未来へと運んでいくものです。私にとってLA MANDALAは、単に鑑賞されるイメージではなく、関係性が生まれる場です。そこでは、異なる記憶、守護、混沌、美、畏敬のかたちが、一つの説明へと統合されることなく、ともに存在することができます。
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Critical Essay by Meher McArthur
The Dynamic Buddhist Paintings of Wakana Kimura
By Meher McArthur
Out of a swirling mass of black ink brushstrokes appear a fearsome blue figure, with bulging eyes and fangs, wielding a sword in one hand and a rope in the other. This is Fudō Myō-ō, "The Immovable One," one of the most powerful and beloved deities in Japanese Buddhism. One of the five Kings of Mystical Knowledge and the wrathful counterpart of the Cosmic Buddha, Fudō symbolizes firmness of spirit and the determination to destroy evil.
As in all her Buddhist paintings, Wakana Kimura portrays Fudō in this new work, LA Mandala, according to iconographic conventions, while also adding her own youthful, dynamic style. Traditionally, Fudō is surrounded with a halo of flames. Here, Kimura sends flame-like jets of red pigment stabbing outwards into the darkness, where they intersect with delicately drawn gold wave patterns, lotuses and other traditional Japanese motifs. The overall effect is a tornado-like, artistic mash-up, both abstract and figural, Western and Eastern, old and new.
Kimura’s approach undoubtedly arose from an evolution in her own artistic and cultural perspectives working for over 15 years in the United States and recently back in Japan again. After receiving a BFA from the Tokyo University of the Arts, Kimura moved to Los Angeles and entered Otis College of Art and Design, where she studied Western abstraction, focusing on color, tone and mark-making, and earned an MFA in 2011. At the end of her time at Otis, she was searching for something new in her work and turned to Japan’s rich artistic heritage, choosing to incorporate Japanese motifs into her work as her “markings.” Since then, many of her larger works have been an assemblage of traditional Japanese imagery and pattern, often featuring deities and symbolism drawn from Buddhist iconography.
In her 2015 recent painting One trifle-beset night, t’was the moon, not I, that saw the pond lotus bloom (a poem written by Japanese Buddhist priest Saigyō [1118-1190] and translated by David McLeod), a Buddhist deity is almost concealed within Kimura’s vividly colored abstraction. At the heart of the four-panel, horizontal painting is the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (Japanese: Fugen) on an elephant. Fugen is considered by many Buddhists to represent action and practice, while his brother, Manjushri, who rides a lion, represents spiritual insight. Here, amidst strong black calligraphic lines and washes of turquoise and lapis pigment, Kimura outlines the details of the elephant, the deity’s robes and the striations of the lotus petals on his throne with the painstaking precision of ancient Buddhist temple artists. But she covers the creature’s head and legs in tiny dots and embellishes his body with lotus flowers, transforming the elephant and deity into ghost-like elements within an abstract composition.
To create these works, Kimura undergoes a sort of mixed-media meditation. As her ritual tools, she uses marker pens and sumi ink, watercolor, vinyl and acrylic on washi paper. Beginning at the center of the paper and then working outward, she builds up the image layer by layer. “Each mark has its own unique identity,” she explains, “and each mark interacts with another mark in its own unique way. All of the marks together represent an individual conceptual structure.” Her placement of the various motifs and patterns evolves naturally as the image expands outward from the central sheet, in a sort of ripple effect. “As with drops of rain in a pond, each drop forms a concentric circle that joins with another concentric circle. Each mark enables communication and creates conversation.”
Kimura has recently been commissioned by Buddhist temples in Japan and in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles to create paintings for specific ceremonies. She also recently completed a residency at a temple in Echizen, where she produced an installation of a mandala (a pattern representing a perfected Buddhist realm), formed of paintings of deities hung in the main temple hall. In traditional Japanese Buddhist paintings, rules have been strict about size, proportions and colors, in order to ensure that the paintings possess the spiritual power of the Buddhist deities. While adhering to these rules with the firmness of Fudō, Kimura also injects her own energy to conjure dynamic mixed-media work that offers a new take on ancient Asian spiritual imagery.
"LA MANDALA" from 2023 is at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles. The work can be viewed by appointment only.
2023年の作品の「LA MANDALA」は、ロサンゼルスのダウンタウンにあるパトリシア・スウィートウ・ギャラリーにて、予約制で特別鑑賞できます。 お気軽にご連絡ください。
Patricia Sweetow Gallery
1-213-265-7471
contact@patriciasweetowgallery.com
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