On August 21, 2024, NOW Art Founder Carmen Zella sat down with artist Alan Nakagawa for a live conversation about public art and LUMINEX 3.0 on Instagram (@nowart_la). RSVP here for future LUMINEX Artist Talks.
Below is a transcript of the video:
Carmen Zella (CZ): Hi guys! Super excited to be hosting this very special IG chat with our Luminex artist, Alan Nakagawa. Thank you everybody for joining. These are so much fun. I’ve been having so much fun meeting all the artists and having these very in depth conversations with them. They’re meant to really go deep with the artist, give you a sense of their reality, where they’re coming from, a little bit of tidbits on what they’re positioning for Luminex, which is happening October 5th.
Six weeks away.
Alan Nakagawa (AN): Wow!
CZ: Yeah. Wee! But I’m super excited, and we have James Gilbert’s sculptures that are behind us. We’re in South Park right now. Represent! Where Luminex is going to be happening. Yeah, let’s just dive into the conversation. Alan, really excited to have this conversation with you.
We’ve been chatting quite a bit beforehand, so I’m going to bring up a couple of the tidbits that we were in dialogue with, but I wanted to start off by just saying thank you so much for participating and being here.
AN: Yeah, thanks for having me.
CZ: I want to go a little bit into you as an artist, how you started, how long you’ve been living in Los Angeles. What’s your association with L.A. as an artist who’s here?
AN: I was born here. I’ve lived here for 60 years. Six decades. It’s been a party. I think, for two years I have lived in Japan. Other than that, I’ve been pretty much here. Oh no, two years in Gardena. Well, Gardena is part of Los Angeles, I think.
CZ: Los Angeles County, yeah.
AN: But to me it’s a different place. So I was born and raised in what’s Koreatown, K-Town, Mid City, that area.
CZ: And so what started to…like from growing up in the K Town area, what really drove you – tell us a little about the art schools that you went to, and what positioned you as an interdisciplinary artist?
AN: So I was the first born in the United States. So everybody – my grandparents, mom, dad, all my uncles and aunts – they all came from Japan after World War II, from Hiroshima and Chiba. And so I was by myself for the first five years until my brother was born.
And I was a quiet kid, and so I was drawing most of the time. So people would find me in back of sofas, inside closets and things drawing quietly. So there’s an artist who came into town from Japan, her name is Shizue Yamashiro. So when I was nine years old, she started, she happened – it was coincidental – but she came in, started a school for kids, and they enrolled me in there. And I was with Sensei for, until I was sixteen. And then to one of those all boy Catholic high schools.
That was an amazing experience, especially as a pagan, and being in a Catholic high school is pretty cool. Lots of music happening there, and then they had this amazing teacher named Sister Yamashiro. Oops, no, sorry. Sister Shimotsubo. She was a nun, but she was a printmaker. And then all this influence brought me to Otis.
So I started at Otis to get my degree. Then after that, Irvine, to get my master’s and then I got a scholarship to go to Japan University in Tokyo to study stage design.
CZ: And that’s the two years that you’re talking about?
AN: Those are the two years, yeah. And so I got a lot of academic time.
I think earlier we were talking about public art. I think what brought me to public art was somewhere in there I met this local artist named Judy Baca. And I was in this mural training program. I must have been 17 years old. And it was like the whole summer, I think.
CZ: At SPARC?
AN: At SPARC. And she taught us how to do consensus building. And we all collectively, we designed two billboards. And that was great, and then I went back to Otis. And there aren’t really public art artists at Otis. They’re all more painters and sculptors and that traditional type of thing, and it just started clicking.
There was this moment, where it was the Chouinard graduates were teaching and then all of a sudden Cal Arts graduates were coming in. The younger artists were coming in and the conceptual philosophy that was brewing was almost violent because it was so opposite in thinking.
CZ: What year was this?
AN: From 1982 to 86. So it wasn’t event Otis then, it was called Otis-Parsons. It was part of Parsons School of Design in New York. And I guess that only lasted a couple years, but on our diploma it says Otis-Parsons School of Design.
CZ: So where did you find yourself in this?
AN: I was the resident composer.
CZ: Okay!
AN: I made the music for a lot of people’s installations and performances, and I did my own performances. Towards the last two years, they hired Ulysses Jenkins, who actually graduated from Otis, and we got to work with Ulysses. That was a separate story, but that was amazing.
And then, actually, it was Ulysses who made it possible for my group of friends to do a project outside of school. It was the first time I had ever presented my work outside of school. And it was on Sunset Boulevard. It was a place called Gallery Ocaso. And there was a guy named Manzanar Gamboa. I didn’t know at the time, but later I found out that this guy is like a heavyweight, especially the POC artist community in Los Angeles. And he had actually started a lot of festivals and arts organizations and things like that. But at the time he had this small little gallery and here we come in, these students, like “yeah, we’re going to do a performance” so we did a multimedia performance art piece and people came and it was fun.
It wasn’t a big deal. Like it was a big deal to us because it was the first time doing something outside of school. And then after that, it just started snowballing. I was asked to be on the performance committee at the Women’s Building.
CZ: The Women’s Building – where was that?
AN: It was on Spring, right before the bridge that goes into Lincoln Heights. Joan Hugo was one of my teachers. So she got me that gig.
CZ: And what were you doing there?
AN: I was on the performance committee with all these amazing feminists.
CZ: Were you doing like you were on the committee, but did you participate doing any sound work with them?
AN: Yeah, I’m a sound person and I was a percussionist. So I actually got to work with Faith Ringgold at one point. I played the drums while Faith did this performance piece around the thing. I was the resident guy. I was like the only guy in the building.
I didn’t really know what feminism was, I hadn’t studied any feminism. They certainly weren’t teaching it at Otis, so I was a complete sort of novice. And sometimes I talked to people who, you know, like Cheri Gaulke and Sue Mayberry, and they’re like, I always feel like they were molding me into this male feminist guy. It was invaluable.
And then, at Irvine, one of my teachers was Linda Vallejo. I don’t know if you know her. She’s one of the original artists from Self Help Graphics. She’s a phenomenal artist, solo artist now. But she looked at me and she says, “Hey, Alan, I’ve been watching you, and I think, would you want to teach at a prison?” And I was like, what?
And she goes, “it pays pretty good, but you have to drive to the prison.” And I said, Oh, pay? Yeah, pay sounds good. I didn’t have any money, I was broke.
And so I started doing that. It felt just like the women’s building or the mural training program at SPARC. I didn’t really know what I was walking into.
CZ: So was it the men’s prison?
AN: First it was the men’s prison in Norco, California. And then they told me to go to the California Institute for Women in Chino and that was a little too intense for me, so I quit after that.
CZ: Were you teaching sound?
AN: No, drawing.
CZ: Okay. Full circle. Interesting.
AN: It was fun. But, I was always doing sound at school.
CZ: So let’s talk a little bit about your residency programs that you’re doing now, because I would love to build into what he’s going to be doing for Luminex, and some of the other work that’s happening in Los Angeles.
AN: I’m sorry, what’s the question?
CZ: Your residency.
AN: Oh, the residencies. So I’m currently doing two. I’m doing one at Cal State Dominguez Hills. That is specifically for their collection – It has to do with a campaign for the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, which ended up being this bill that Reagan signed, I believe.
And all the families who were imprisoned just because they were Japanese in blood – they’re all mostly Japanese Americans, but they were putting these little prisons around a Native American camp. I guess that was like four or five years. And then they were let go, but by then, if they owned property, that was gone, so it was a major hardship.
CZ: How many families are we talking about?
AN: It’s 120,000 people I believe. But I don’t know how many families.
And then the other residency – so I’m researching that right now, because it’s a huge collection. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m supposed to figure that out in a couple of months. The other one…
CZ: Sorry, and how is that going to culminate? Is that going to be like in an exhibition, or is it a recorded piece, or is it a performance piece? Or, that’s all up in the air.
AN: Maybe to all of the above – But I would like to work with students. My friend, Devon Tsuno, teaches there. So I did have lunch with Devon. Oh no, breakfast with Devon. And we had that preliminary kind of idea.
And then the other one is at USC. There’s Kaya Press, which is a 30-year-old small press, publication. They do Asian diaspora literature. And a lot of Asian American diaspora literature.
So they’re turning 30, and so they thought it’d be a good idea to hire an artist. I actually started last August. So last August, I asked for every book that they published. And since then, they’ve actually published more. So for about 12 months, I’ve been trying to read every book in their library, which I did it!
CZ: He finished last week! The last book.
AN: I finished last week. But, however, July 1st of this year, July 1st, I have a special shelf of all the Kaya books, and they’re all alphabetical. So I started with the first one, I pull it out, there are some underlined places, and there are post its. So I read everything that seemed to jump out at me when I was reading it.
And then that is where the libretto comes from. So something yells at me and says, I’m the libretto. And then I type it into the computer, and then I start looking at it, and I usually rearrange it so it’s more like musical or poetic or however you want to say that. And then I live with that for a little bit.
Maybe I go do something, I come back. And then something says, “Turn on this piece of equipment and start there.” And that’s what I’ve been doing. So by the end of the day, I finished the bass track of that micro opera. We’re calling them micro operas because they’re very short. They’re like five minute long pieces.
It’s like the minute end of an opera. And it’s fast like that because as I mentioned, there’s 67 of them. We have to start rehearsals in October. So I don’t have a lot of advanced time.
CZ: But with each of the operas, what you explained to me is that you’re translating them as either performance pieces, some are films.
AN: There’s four categories. Or, I guess categories. One is performative. Absolutely. Misu and I recruited all these amazing artists to be part of this. And then there’ll be projections. Closer to what I’m doing with you guys for the festival. A vibratory sound piece. I call it Invisible Architecture. And then the third is, I’m calling them music boxes, but they’re not music boxes like that. They’re sculptural. It’s like Harry Partch, Yoko Ono. It’s kind of like that, that’s what they are. So you walk up to them, there’s instructions and then you participate in whatever happened while you were in front of this thing.
CZ: Fluxus.
AN: Yeah it’s a very Fluxus inspired thing. Because the micro opera, when I went to go see it in, what was it, 86 or 85 or something like that, at the Mark Taper Forum, they had everything.
CZ: Right after the Olympics.
AN: Right after the Olympics.
CZ: When the buzz was happening.
AN: Yeah, it was like “Oh, LA!” Art, theater! It was cool and I especially liked, so there was one with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. So it’s a quartet, and it was staged by Robert Wilson, but there’s a quartet in the middle, and there’s an actor, and he’s reciting his piece, and there’s all these bulbs in a grid form. And every time he finishes some part of this monologue, he pulls down a light.
And at the end, they’re like in a cave of light. Where, when they started, it was just lit, it was just like lights coming. And this actor was Kelsey Grammer. I think we all saw him on Taxi maybe? But I don’t think the Kelsey Grammer show that was happening yet. But we were all like, who is this guy?
Like this guy’s amazing. Yeah, he’s amazing. And then the another one was Carla Bley, jazz pianist, but she had a whole ensemble and it was very theatrical. And, so for me, I was probably like 19 years old. Had never really seen anything like that. Particularly…I mean Laurie Anderson was popular.
We saw her in Pasadena.
CZ: My hero.
AN: With David Van Tieghem. Adrian Belew And that was cool, but what she was doing was like performance art rock. What this was more like opera, theater, almost musical. And Robert Wilson, pretty amazing man.
CZ: Wow. So this piece for the residency is inspired by that?
AN: Yeah, because it’s the 40th anniversary of that concert, the micro opera concert, and it’s 30 years of Kaya Press. So I thought it couldn’t be a coincidence that it’s 30 and 40. So that’s what made me propose to Kaya that I’ll read all your books and then I’ll make a micro opera based on each of the books.
And they thought I was crazy. But here we are!
CZ: So the exhibition is going to be happening February the 12th.
AN: At the One Archive.
CZ: At the One Archive. So this is the build up for that. I want to really talk about Luminex now.
AN: Sorry. Yeah.
CZ: Don’t be sorry.
This all is like part of, like this is all part of it. Because we’re bringing these artists who are phenomenal, have incredible history in Los Angeles, are doing these incredible pieces in L.A. and other parts of L.A., to this exhibition as interdisciplinary artists that are really at the top of their game for art and technology, segues between.
And I want to dial in on the piece that you’re doing because it’s extraordinary and it’s also another amplification.
AN: Is it extraordinary?
CZ: Yeah. Yes!
AN: I thought it was just me.
CZ: No! It’s going to be at the park area. Luminex being in the South Park area is in like all of these different urban sites.
And the site that Alan Nakagawa’s work is going to be housed in is at the South Park Commons, which is this parklet site where it has benches and some greenery that’s associated there. So talk a little bit about your site-specificity of the work and how it has, the larger kind of concept behind it.
AN: So it starts with growing up in L.A. and, I think every artist I know at least, we’re proud of so many things here, but especially the Watts Tower. That’s very iconic and also the story of how Simon Rodia made it is really interesting. And so I was taking this sort of rabbit, went into a rabbit hole about that.
And I was given this opportunity to go somewhere in the world and research something. And I thought, well, I’ve never been in Europe. I’d like to go to Barcelona and see the Gaudi’s. Because I always felt that there was this connection between Simon Rodia and Gaudi’s work. I don’t think that’s so far fetched, I think that’s kind of obvious, but I had never seen anybody do anything about the two guys. I was working on this project with this filmmaker, Rebecca Baron, who teaches at Cal Arts. I was telling Rebecca about this, and Rebecca goes, Alan, did I mention that I used to live in Barcelona? And I was like, no. She goes, I could totally introduce you to some folks.
And within a month, I was in communication with the University of Barcelona, which is where Gaudi went. And they’re actually in charge of a lot of his buildings. If it wasn’t for Rebecca, I don’t think any of that would have happened. My proposal was to record the interior acoustics of the Sagrada Familia, and then do the same thing at Watts Towers, and then wed them together.
It’s a mash up. It’s an acoustic mash up and that’s what I call Invisible Architecture, right? We were talking about this earlier. It’s like you get one place and another place and then combine them acoustically and it becomes this third place that doesn’t actually exist, right?
CZ: Because when you’re walking through a space we have all of these subliminal like points of interest visually and we never think about the subliminal point of interest of how your voice echoes or what the sound natively is inside of these architectural sites. And so in this mashup, you’re going to, you culminate the two into this sort of third architectural space.
AN: Yeah. I went to Wilton Place Elementary School. This is a long time ago. It’s still there. And I was in the library, and I was looking at a book, and it was a Gaudi.
So that was the first time I ever saw Gaudí’s work. And later I thought, that guy stole Simon Rodia’s idea!
CZ: So how is that translating into the space in the South Park area?
AN: So when you guys invited me first, when I walked it with Paul, I wasn’t sure about the space. It’s very concrete, landscape, it’s rectangular. And then I saw the benches. I saw these benches. There’s something about these benches. I asked you guys, can I use these benches? And you guys said yes. So I’ve always wanted to use…I have these sound beds, but I don’t have sound seats, and I thought sound seats…
I like sound seats because I’ve always wanted to do something about vibrational seating cause when I was a kid, my parents owned a restaurant and I rarely ever saw my dad cause he would come home late, and my brother and I would have to go to sleep. But I always knew when he was home, cause the lazy boy in the living room would turn on, and you’d hear like this, grrrrrr, and I’ve always wanted to do sound like that. There’s something about that. If you’re not asleep, you can almost hear what part of the rotation the massage the lazy boy would do, right? Yeah. So that amazed me. I don’t know if my brother was doing that, but I was doing that when I was half asleep.
And there’s something about those benches at that space that sort of sang to me, so I wanted to use that. We’re going to test it today. I’m sure it’s going to work. And we’re going to arrange them in a half circle. My piece is called Conical Sound: Simon Rodia / Antoni Gaudi. That’s the name of the piece, but this piece is gonna be very different from how I presented it.
And also this is only the second time it’s ever been presented. The first time I presented it as a three speaker installation. So you got this environment kind of acoustic mashup thing, but here you’d be sitting down, so it’s monophonic. I had to remix the whole thing so it’s monophonic, which was a lot of fun.
And each bench will have its own speaker. And it’ll be like Conical Sound as a lazy boy.
CZ: So it’s gonna have this sensorial as well as acoustic…
AN: Yeah it’ll be buzzing but also have these subliminal subsonics happening. I’m not just using the two spaces.
I also did a recording of a mass at the Montserrat outside of Barcelona. So it’ll be the first time I’m using that field recording that I have. And I always use frequency clusters by Royal Rife. Do you know, have you ever heard of Royal Rife? He’s an interesting scientist from the 1930s who allegedly…
Well for sure, he was the inventor of the most powerful microscope up to that moment. So he had chops, but he was doing this thing where he was using sound frequencies, and to measure cells. And then he came up with this idea that if he could measure the frequency of the cell, then he can figure out what the anti frequency of that cell is and kill it.
So he was allegedly killing pathogens. And it’s either some folklore that’s not true, or it could be like one of the major coverups of medical history. I don’t know.
CZ: Oh my god. I think it’s gonna be the latter.
AN: Yeah. But I, there’s a whole society people into that. So I found the list of all the frequency clusters, and when I looked at them, I realized, these are microtones.
So I was like, Oh my God, this is like Royal Rife inadvertently created a whole vocabulary of microtones. And people like Harry Partch and John Cage and Lou Harrison. It’s a whole library, but I never studied any of that. I went to a visual arts school. We didn’t have – I was the music department when I was there, even for the graduation I composed and performed the processional and the recessional. I didn’t even walk the graduation thing. I was in the orchestra thing. So I just felt, wow, this must be a gift.
CZ: So how was that going to be incorporated into this work?
AN: So there are three clusters, frequency clusters that I picked, that I thought would be fun. And they’re subliminally in the piece.
CZ: Amazing. So you’ve got to come so that you can experience these subliminal microfrequency clusters. Alan, this was so much fun. I could sit here talking to Alan for the rest of the night.
If you have any questions that you want to direct to the artist, please put them in the chat. We’re going to put this IG chat on live on our artist portal site, but we’re also going to be pitching them for anyone that signs up for the newsletter. So thank you so much. This was so much fun!
AN: Thanks!
CZ: Yeah, absolutely. We will see you all at Luminex. Thank you.