Shingo Honda



FROM SNOW COUNTRY JAPAN TO THE TROPICAL RAINFOREST OF HAWAII, HE EXPRESSES IMPERMANENCE

by Lynne Farr
		Shingo Honda was born in Northern Japan - snow country. As a child he was fascinated by thin ice which formed on a puddle of water. As he says, “I’d pick up the ice, so shiny and beautiful, reflecting the sunlight, but, in a moment, it was gone. It had melted in my hand.” This experience of the ephemeral is the metaphor he uses to explain the underlying theme of all his work during his career as an artist. “I liked that transient, ever-changing world and it has always been what I’ve wanted to express,” he says. “The word “permanent” is unrealistic. There’s no such thing. I want to melt an irrational concept.”


	In Japan, in the early seventies, Shingo Honda was known for his installations. At theTokyo Municipal Museum, he installed a wooden floor in which alternate boards were lifted at the ends. At night he would go in and change the boards. No one knew except him.
	One piece, shown at the Tokyo National Museum, was a block of white concrete roped to a column, like a dog straining at its leash. When it was shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, there were no columns to rope it to. The end of the rope was left untied. The concrete block had escaped its confinement. Years later, this series of works was designated by critics and curators as being part of Japan’s influential “Mono Ha” art movement.
			WHITE CONCRETE and HAWSER 1970 concrete 4'x4'x4'

EXTENSION #32 1977 print/photo engraving 15"h x 20"d

Throughout the seventies Honda
also made embossed photo
engravings which, he says, he
thought of as installations on
paper. In them, some people
wore traditional kimonos, others
wore Western clothing: changing.
Everyone was going somewhere,
leaving their embossed positions
and heading off, where? To see
the world as it turned out, when
the prints traveled to shows in
Europe, America, Australia, and,
recently, Hawaii.
click here to view prints at idspace, Hawaii, July - August 2006

orange square

In the early eighties, while still living in Japan, he painted the abstract series “To White Space”, expressing his theme in large acrylic works on canvas. In them, the white space, the void, was the main focus, the ground of harmony, and the color expressed the movement and change. “You could say I painted the wind, or the seasons, or you could say I painted my changing emotions: conflict, confusion, or joy,” he explains. When he accompanied these paintings to the United States he saw an opportunity for personal change.

TO WHITE SPACE #94 1983
acrylic on canvas 71"h x 35"d

COMMENTARY #53     1994
acrylic/paper     49"h x 37"w

In the mid-eighties Honda moved to Los Angeles. Influenced
by a new country and the freedom of expression that went
with it, he looked for new ways to explore his theme. “What
does a child paint after it paints abstractions?” he asked
himself. “Flowers in their simplest forms,” was his answer.

CASE #78 1995 acrylic/mix on canvas 64"h x 115"w

He painted his “simplest forms” of flowers for over ten years, eventually arriving at his “Case”
series in the nineteen-nineties. He comments, “I painted the flowers as though they were
captured for a moment on a scrap of paper, something you could tear away to reveal the pure
white canvas. And they’re in a sort of space, but the space is intermediate. Where’s the bottom
Where’s the top? Are the flowers inside or outside? Are the coming or going?”

In the late nineties, travel refreshed
his interest in people. In his ensuing
“Parallel” series, using acrylic and
graphite, he drew and painted
people he didn’t know and who
didn’t know each other, putting
them in spaces of his own creation
where they’d never been, and where
they’d never been together. About
his work he says “Each person lives
in their own space, different from
mine and different from each
others’. They have their own reality
and it is always changing. I don’t
know what they’re thinking or what
they see, or where they’re going or
where they’ve been. Our paths may
never cross again, but in this parallel
world, there’s something that we
share. We are not strangers.”

PARALLEL #8 2000 acrylic/graphite on canvas 65"h x 74"w

Since 2005 Shingo Honda has lived on The Big Island of Hawaii and of course his work is changing. With his spare and urban “Parallel” series, he says, he was rearranging people and spaces to suit his concept. Now, in his Hawaiian rainforest “High Noon” series he wants to draw and paint more of what he actually sees, show natures amazing energy, yet still express that each moment holds a changing reality. Though he’s far away from snow country, somewhere, deeply in his mind, is the sparkle of a thin sheet of ice, melting in his hand.

HIGH NOON A-1 2006 mixed media on paper 16 1/2"h x 10 1/2"w




www.shingohonda.com