Interview: Chihiro ITO—Poet, Painter, Filmmaker

By Madeline Trice
Photography by Mica Scalin and Dolly Winter

Born in Tokyo, Chihiro ITO is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in NYC. His work has been shown in countries all over the world, including the 2012 European Capital of Culture in Portugal, Cypress, Serbia, Lithuania, Japan, and the United States. The child of sculptors, ITO developed an interest in the arts from a young age and in 2018 he received a grant from the Japanese government to travel to New York where he studied the Fluxus movement and met Jonas Mekas. Chihiro ITO is painter, poet, performer, filmmaker, and more. He recently released his film, "Reel to Reel -to Jonas Mekas-" as part of his residency with the Jonas Mekas Studio, and he’s currently one of the artists in residence for AnkhLave Art Alliance’s 2024 Garden Project Fellowship. Read more about Chihiro ITO and his work on his personal website, and check out the AnkhLave house on Governors Island in New York City to view his work in person until October 31st, 2024.

(Trice) As a Japanese immigrant to the United States, do you feel your artistic practice has been influenced by the experience?

​(ITO) Yes, I think my experiences in the US has influenced my art practices. Example, in my country Japan, very, very difficult to create political related art works (almost taboo). Here a lot of artists do political art very directly.

(Trice) You mention on your website that in your teenage years you were devoted to becoming an artist and a boxer. At first glance this seems like a peculiar combination, how do you think your history as a boxer informs or influences your art?

(ITO) These experiences are affected by how connected my body movement and my art are. Example; one jab in boxing is the same as one brush stroke. It's all about control of movement. How I control my body and how I control one line of paint are both the same movement. I did these practices for 15 years. The most important thing for creating my art is my physical body.


(Trice) Your “Vegetables in Isolation” and “NEW FLAG for NEW PEOPLE” projects both feature the use of vegetable and floral imagery and you mention in your artist statement for “Vegetables in Isolation” that eating the vegetables is part of your artistic process. On your website, talking about the shock of immigration to the U.S. in context of the contemporary political and cultural landscape in 2018, you chose the word “digest” to communicate how you processed this shift in your life and internalized it into your art. Could you speak more directly to how food and eating relate to your artistic practice?

​(ITO) As I said before, my artwork and my body are connected. Just as I can't escape from my body, I can't stop eating. I'm free to choose what to eat. I grew up in Tokyo, a city (concrete jungle). For me, the appearance of vegetables (before they were refined) before they were lined up in the supermarket and the taste of fresh vegetables were fresh. To put it simply in terms of taste, I'm sure you've eaten tomatoes that look the same but have a completely different sweetness. Eating fresh vegetables gives me energy. I need a lot of energy to paint. Eating vegetables helps me regain lost energy. That helps me paint. I also want to paint pictures that give energy to people who see them, just like vegetables, so I eat vegetables while I paint.

(Trice) You use all-caps in a myriad of places in your art: the title of “NEW FLAG for NEW PEOPLE,” in poems such as “NEW HEAVEN,” and even in the romanized spelling of your professional name, “Chihiro ITO.” Is there a unifying significance to the use of all-caps in your art or do you often find yourself drawn to all-caps as a signifier for many different things?

(ITO) I am very interested in the effect of letterform design as a visual image. I grew up in Japan where there were 3 types of non English letterform characters, but we don’t use capitalization. I also worked as a graphic designer there., so for me using all capital letters is a way to create a stronger visual expression of the meaning of each word. It feels like I am saying the capitalized words louder in the text.


(Trice) As primarily a painter, what sparked this new passion for film and poetry?

(ITO) I think it applies to both. The logic of the text is fixed, but by changing it in my own way, I can create subtle changes in the written expression I envision even with the same words. My native language, Japanese, has three ways of writing: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. There are always three ways to express one word with characters, using those characters differently. They can even subtly change the nuance of the meaning. I think these experiences are related to the idea of ​​using capital letters.

(Trice) Having known the man himself, what has it been like to receive the Jonas Mekas Fellow Residency Award and access the Jonas Mekas Studio archive as part of your work on “Reel to Reel?”

(ITO) He was my friend and mentor. It was a great chance to create new collaboration works with Jonas Mekas and his son Sebastian, archivist. I watched private archival materials, also 1000 more before-edited videos, his book collections, bolex camera, etc etc. My artistic research lasted six months, and the results are summarized in the exhibition "Reel to Reel -to Jonas Mekas-". The exhibition features artifacts collected by Jonas Mekas Studio, an archive that looks after Jonas Mekas's legacy in the US and around the world, which are reinterpreted and re-actualised in a unique way by me. The exhibition consists of cross-media works combining fragments of films, zines, books, photographs and collages. In the Reel to Reel series, named after one of Jonas Mekas's archive files that he discovered, I explore the connections between Jonas Mekas, Japan, New York, Lithuania, poetry, haiku, his friends, and the moments captured in the archives. My work preserves the plasticity and simplicity of Jonas Mekas' thought.

As a Japanese artist I choose simple means and DIY methods, where the idea and its cross-cultural resonance are the most important thing, rather than a sophisticated form and visual effect. This synchronized me with Jonas Mekas's way very deeply and as a Japanese-born artist who immigrated to NY, I resonated with Mekas as a Lithuanian artist who immigrated to NY. Through the residency, our shared experience gave me a lot of self-confidence.

#interview #artist #painting #film ​#ankhlavegardenproject