TengaOne was born in 1977 near Tokyo, in the city of Fussa. He was brought up in accordance with the traditional Japanese values of strictness and discipline: diligent study was welcomed, while freedom of the spirit was discouraged, and the general idea was to bring up ‘a worthy member of society’. From early childhood TengaOne was fond of drawing, but this passion met with resistance from his family. So he drew in secret so as to be not caught in the act by his parents. TengaOne failed to become a true otaku: his parents forbade him to read mangas. So as not to ask for pocket money to buy comics, he collected copies of Dragon Ball or the manga weekly Weekly Shonen Jump that had been read by someone else and then thrown away, secretly brought them home, and practised copying them at night. The following day, he would show off his versions of the illustrations by pinning them to the school noticeboard.
Drawing accompanied TengaOne at literally every step: the walks he took after school went past the US air base of Yokota. Next to the air base was a railway station that was a Mecca for graffiti bombing. The station building and the rolling stock standing idle in the depot were completely covered with graffiti. Tags, bubble letters hastily painted on walls, overlapping fragments of graffiti: soldiers based here after the war had left the classics of the old US school of graffiti. Each time he passed the station, TengaOne absorbed the aesthetic and found inspiration in aerosol painting.
At the age of 14 TengaOne began producing stuff that demonstrated a well-trained eye, bombing the streets of Tokyo with his own graffiti. He had no particular desire to make a name for himself in street art – and at the beginning of the 2000s street art did not have the status it has today. At the time it was difficult to imagine enormous murals or urban interventions receiving coverage in the media or street artists picking up contracts to collaborate with luxury brands.
For almost 15 years TengaOne hid his works away in a drawer – or rather on walls. He did not stop covering Tokyo’s wall surfaces and railway rolling stock with paintings sprayed using an aerosol can, but when it came to earning his daily bread, he chose to create something that would bring him proper recognition (i.e. something well-paid and stable). His first job was as a designer for a clothing brand. Subsequently, he moved into graphic design and websites. But while doing these jobs, he continued building up his confidence as a graffiti artist, developed his own style, and gradually infiltrated the local graffiti movement.
In different spots in Tokyo a new proliferation of monsters began attracting and repelling passers-by with their comicality and frightening realism. Each of the weirdos drawn by TengaOne was a metaphor for the tragic accidents, catastrophes, absurd happenings, and senseless wars which humans have initiated over the course of their history. This was the monster as portrait of man – or rather of that part of man which has survived of his original image.
One day, while investigating graffiti with some friends in the port city of Aomori, TengaOne happened upon Ron Mueck’s Standing Woman at Towada Art Centre. Looking at the main part of the museum’s collection, TengaOne discovered objects that differed from the standard run of works of contemporary art:
For TengaOne ‘comprehensible contemporary art’ became a convenient transition point between street art and strange objects. It was a point at which he chose to linger, retaining the pseudonym given him by the graffiti crowd. Now is the moment to end the suspense and reveal this construct’s meaning. No, it was not what you might think – not a vulgar allusion to the popular manufacturer of toys for adults. Although the range of cultural phenomena in Japan includes much worse than this. Realizing that drawing was his vocation and his fate, he had initially called himself simply ‘Tenga’: 天画. The kanji 天 translates as ‘skies, gift, predestination’, and 画 as ‘art, painting’. But all the poetry was taken out of this name when that other Tenga burst onto the market of latex products – making it necessary for Tenga the artist to distance himself and remind people whose name it was that had first incorporated this word. Thus it was that approximately five years ago, Tenga became the first and only one of his kind: TengaOne.
The vector of travel had been chosen; now it was time to choose the medium. Making himself at home in his new, as yet unequipped studio, TengaOne sought a way of working at a comfortable height. Paintings can be hung on a wall, but figures and sculptures require a stand. Who among us has not had the occasion – if only once, when moving home – to use cardboard boxes for this purpose? We are so accustomed to seeing cardboard items everywhere around us that we no longer notice this material’s presence. Cardboard’s autonomous materiality is eroded by its extraordinary familiarity. TengaOne had had a special relationship with this material from early childhood. His father had worked in the meat industry, so the family’s apartment had often been bursting with cardboard boxes stained with fat from slaughterhouse by-products:
Traumatic experience often becomes a source of reflection. Even if this trauma has its roots in… cardboard. How can an artist draw attention to everyday things? And how is it possible to refresh the representation of these things, play with them in a new way, while remaining faithful to the genre? By making cardboard non-cardboard, for instance. Or, to take a different route, by making cardboard out of non-cardboard. (Another few series of lexical replications would turn strong ‘cardboard’ into something far flimsier, into sawdust in a ‘card-toon’.)
TengaOne had masterfully copied drawings from comics as a child. Now he embarked on the no less sophisticated copying of cardboard and all its characteristics. The material’s slightly dreary, mid-beige colour; the matt, almost rough texture of its surface; the inability to reflect light; the rhythm of the corrugations, which matches the proportions of the triangular holes on the transverse section: all this he cuts out carefully and at length with a scalpel from panels of MDF. Because of what they are made of, the pliant sheets of compressed woodchips can be cut in such a way as to imitate even the occurrence of dust during manipulation. TengaOne spends 12 hours every day carving wood to imitate cardboard. The result is a verisimilitude that is compelling, even a little excessive.
The same degree of irrationality may be seen in Japanese brands of streetwear. Boiling denim for weeks to get rid of any hint of a resemblance to denim; ageing goatskin to create precisely the right type of cracks; making vintage clothes from super-modern materials: all this is absurd but painstaking and technological – and therefore attractive.
Attractiveness is one of the key concepts studied by TengaOne. It is no accident he called one of his recent exhibitions ‘More than meets the eye’. The first thing you notice is achingly familiar characters from all kinds of pop-culture sources. Full-size super-robots that resemble Michael Bay’s old-school transformers, their microscopically detailed masks placed in a tondo like in a petri dish. (For amusement, you could conduct a comparative visual test with the eclectic sculptural masks made by Dima Shabalin.)
On the pieces of pseudo-cardboard TengaOne started placing figures from old Warner Brothers cartoons such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Tasmanian Devil, and Yosemite Sam. Disney legends, figures from advertising clips, logos of popular coffee shops and pizza-delivery services: TengaOne has no compunction about scattering visual anchors all over his work. In his hands the symbols of pop culture are not material for transformations but a way of changing how these popular images are perceived.
As we seek out in TengaOne’s acrylic paintings figures that are well known to us from childhood, our perception is guided over the work of art by its initial recognizability and comprehensibility. Or to be more exact, it moves over the surface of the painting – noticing that someone familiar has been drawn on something familiar. Although these cartoon figures are not often seen on used and worn materials – on pieces of cardboard from box cardboard boxes or used cupholders – this is not a problem. The work becomes incisively shocking at the moment when we see that carboard is missing from the list of materials found on its label – and discover that the world’s most common packaging material has here been imitated. Our perceptions, which are based on comprehensibility and recognizability, now seem untrustworthy. This is when we begin seeing the work for what it is.
Repeat examination throws up new questions. Are the traces of this ‘cardboard’’s use also not real? What about the bar codes and the labels marked ‘fragile’? How many additional quote marks will we have to add? Are these really the figures that we know so well? Were they recorded in the archives of our memory as such, or are they really such? This is like memories from distant childhood, fragments of which can be replaced without our noticing or whose contents can be distorted and recorded in our minds differently from how they were when we experienced them. Attractiveness becomes a synonym of illusoriness and superficiality.
In entertaining the viewer’s gaze with a game of similarities, TengaOne casts doubt on the opposition between original and imitation. The robots he depicts on his fake-cardboard bases are copies drawn from original robots. At the same time the original robots, which were invented by man, are a reflection, an image that borrows the structure of beetles, fish, birds, and other natural phenomena. The original owes its status to its recognizability but itself began as an imitation. It is an inherent – and, it seems, even convenient – quality of human beings to reveal dichotomy in everything. TengaOne uses multi-level imitation to smooth over this polarity and mix up the categories of ‘original’ and ‘fake’: all the things around us resemble, and yet are distinct from, one another at the same time. It’s just that to convey this thought, it was necessary to imitate imitation –