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HI Art Magazine, a magazine for Art in Hawaii Hawaii artist Randy Takaki

by Lynne Farr

Randy Takaki creates these images. Or are they creating him? He and they have been doing their dance, or fighting their battles, quietly emerging together for the last ten years. A few go back as far as 1985. Since then, one of them has rusted away to nothing. He no longer remembers where some of them are.

Some call them “Guardians” and sometimes he does too.
“I don’t always know what to call them,” he says, in his soft voice.

He doesn’t try to name them or explain them. He doesn’t want to put them in a box.
He insists on their freedom to be as they are.

He doesn’t want to be explicit about their origins either, though they’ve revealed themselves from many media. It doesn’t matter to him whether they’re made from a 5,000 year old Japanese sugi cedar, or a 200 year old cherry tree which blew down in a typhoon. It’s unimportant whether they came from ohia, koa, or cypress, were shaped from wire, drawn in motor oil on raw plywood, or scraped from the rust on a discarded roof panel.

He doesn’t want to talk about the year they were born, or what tool shaped their existence: the chisel, the hammer, the paint brush or the chain saw in his hands.

It’s not just that Randy Takaki is a man of few words, though he is. His silence on the subject of his art is unselfish, a gag on the extraneous, and a favor to the viewer: a way to let each person find their own access, to let each person take from it what they will, the way he does.

As for him, if he never had an audience, if no one else ever saw his images, if he lived as a hermit in a cave on top of a mountain, he’d still be making them. “It’s not about having an audience,” he says. “It’s not about art, either. It has simply become a ritual.”

Like the master calligrapher who draws hundreds of versions of the zen circle of the ground of harmony and then throws them away, or the forest monk who walks alone in silent meditation, day after day, year upon year, it’s not about “getting it right” or “arriving somewhere.” As Takaki says, each piece of material that comes to him is “the raw Buddha.” Then why make it into something? “To learn,” he says. “The ritual is leading me. I don’t know where but
it’s okay not to know. As the pieces become, I become.”

For an upcoming show in July 2007 at idspace, a gallery in his home territory of Puna, he has created nothing. No one can see his work in advance, because it doesn’t yet exist. It will happen at the time.

	Whether his images are “Guardians” of him, or us, he can’t really say, and if he could, he wouldn’t. They will appear when they appear, as they appear. And they are as deeply quiet as he is.