by Audrey Kawasaki
There. I said it. I feel better. Please validate my opinion*. Everyone in NYC*a is going nuts over her gallery opening. She seems like a very nice person. And her style, technique, composition are all gorgeous. I actually like some of the drawings in her sketchbooks. Ok, she’s very talented.
But the dreamy-eyed floating girls with pouty lips & a high child-like forehead make me SO ANGRY!*b
I think what bothers me most about her paintings is that it glorifies prettiness. For girls.*** Like the subject/girl’s esteem/agency is bound to her desirability to the Other. She is choosing/resigning to be a doll. The only thing that saves the paintings from being complete decorative candy is the random dark/creepy object in the composition. Maybe the darkness is a symbol for how the girl in the painting feels like she’s dying because she is just a shell of perfect prettiness, but I still don’t like the paintings. They remind me of angsty highschool girl drawings****, and I want to yell, “CMON GROW UP! Stop feeding everyone’s fantasies of being self-inflicted pretty-pretty! Can’t you make the girls just a little more badass?”.
And the same goes for you Stella Im Hultberg.*****
On a positive note, I am starting to appreciate paintings of women by Molly Crabapple a lot more.
*j/k!**
*aSeriously, I googled “i hate audrey kawasaki” (without quotes) and the first page of results were of people drooling over her work. I feel so alone.
*bI think some essay I read in college would say that a visceral reaction makes art Art. Or that cultural relevance makes something Art. But I would say this is more some cross-section of manga-illustration with a high level of skill. Kind of like how Norman Rockwell illustrations are still illustrations. And everything in Juxtapoz magazine is not Art! It’s street/pop/underground art. It’s worthwhile and it has value. But I think it needs to last longer/tested longer in order to be Art. Let’s set aside my inconsistent, “That’s not Art!” indignity (maybe jealousy?) toward Kawasaki’s work…
**no, really, I can’t be the only one.
***She sometimes paints boys, but it’s mostly girls. Some people argue that the girls are women (because they have boobs), but the proportions of the face suggests youth (and the face is usually the focal point). The girls only look like women when you think of manga women (which, I think most people would agree, are girls, really).
****Which my friends and I may or may not have drawn in college. Highschool really sucked, which makes me question the validity of my opinion even more.
*****I first saw Audrey Kawasaki’s paintings at a show in Portland called Four Dreams. It featured artwork by Amy Sol, Audrey Kawasaki, Mari Inukai & Stella Im Hultberg. And they all drew pretty girls. I was pretty much seething for hours afterwards. (I think Amy Sol is ok because her girls are more forlorn/less sexy & Mari Inukai is ok because her girls seem capable of having fun on their own terms.) I find it interesting that Kawasaki seems to be the most popular out of the four. I wonder if it’s because she adheres to her style & subject matter more consistently than the others. Kind of like a brand.
11 Comments
Well said.
Would you still feel the same if this person Audrey wasn’t asian??
haha i think i would be even more annoyed if audrey wasn’t asian! kind of like how tokidoki is italian… but he’s a dude, so i don’t care as much. OH!!! if audrey were a boy i would just roll my eyes and not care!
yeah, if audrey were a boy, this sort of idealization of women could be dismissed as pubescent boy fantasy. but the fact that she’s a girl… i don’t know. i don’t see anything ironic there that would make me believe she’s critical of the images.
i had a dream the other night that you lived in my building in chinatown when we were little, and that we were being chased by skeletons with swords. weird, huh?
holy shit, that sounds like the kind of dreams that i used to have when i was little!!
i think i agree with you on the no-irony + gender switch thing…
I came here over google cause i wanted to find out if anyone expressed a thought about her rei-terating the same recipe ad nausea. I hate how the girls are just blueprints of the typical peachy glossy-lipped lolita fantasy, and even more that they are all so ideally almond-eyed. They re not really asian, but just the right little amount of it to come across as exotic, but not too foreign to put the mainstream viewer off.
Nope, this is not art.
This is the only good result I found by typing “I hate Audrey Kawasaki”. I agree with you, she is not an artist. But I think she is not even a great illustrator. It´s quite easy to draw the same beautiful girl again and again. Everybody likes pretty faces, that´s the mistery of her success, so, what´s the challenge? I began to hate my own work when I saw hers, I´ve never followed her style, but people has told me a lot of times that both look quite similar, and that´s so discouraging…
@mona: interesting, i hadn’t really thought about the ethnicity of the girls.
@melissa: i think you are being a little harsh – on both yourself & audrey. your works are much more experimental than audrey’s and have a greater subject range… maybe the problem is that there isn’t (yet) a category for contemporary art that focuses on female subjects created by women? and that’s why people compare your artwork to hers?
sort of like, if someone said, “I’m an author. I’m writing a diary.” one might say, “That’s not literature.” but if the diary were well-written and called a ‘memoir’ and dealt with complex topics, then it might be considered literature.
i think part of the problem is that ‘ingenue w/angst’ is not recognized as a serious topic, and maybe it should be.
I googled the same thing just to see what would come up and this is the only site I got! Every other site was people going head over heels for her. I do appreciate her art and her success, and I do love to look at her art. It can be pretty boring looking at the same distinct thing over and over again though. But all artists dream of having a distinct style. It’s really just a double edged sword. She is by no means an illustrator though, a lot more work goes into illustrating then painting pretty girls. As for Stella Im Hultburg, I use to love her tea stained paintings but these days I feel her art is actually sloppy and it seems as though not as much time is put into them as her older pieces.
@Everyone that said Audrey’s work is not art: You are idiots plain and simple. I have no problem with you saying her art is total crap and stating your reasons why, but you can’t say what is and isn’t art. James Whistler sued an art critic and won because the critic, in essence, said that what he had created wasn’t art. Constantin Brancusi sued US customs when they tried to say that something he was shipping in the country was raw materials, when it was abstract art, and won. Others have done the same, but those two are rather famous. The point I’m making is that the artist decides what art is. Everyone else can decide it’s worthless, but they can’t say it’s not art. At least not without showing how ignorant they are.
I do happen to like her work, by the way. I’m also a 28 year old male, and I can assure you I don’t like it simply because of my “pubescent boy fantasies.” I was introduced to her by a heterosexual female that enjoys her work quite a bit.
I’m by no means saying Audrey is on the same level as many of the Renaissance artists, but what many of you said is the equivalent of saying, “Donatello’s, Michelangelo’s, etc. work was crap because much of it contained the same style of ‘idealized’ naked male form.” It’s just rather ignorant.
@hello: i hadn’t thought about that, you’re right that illustration has different requirements than art. there are specific people to please, specific problems to solve.
@dustin: thanks for writing & contributing a new viewpoint. if you could refrain from calling people idiots, that would be rad. i don’t agree that an artist gets to decide what art is. i think that is be a useful concept and is a valid way to think about art. but capital-A Art is more of a social construct, sort of like what works of writing get to be Literature.
also: re Classical Art, there are different rules for categorizing different types of art. if, in 50 years, audrey kawasaki’s art is the best, most lasting, of this type of art (which her website describes as ‘Paintings of women on wood with a consistent, distinctive style.’), then i’ll put her in my subjective Art canon.
also, i don’t trust the US legal system to define what equals Food, much less Art.
i am curious though, are you an artist, and why do you think that Art = whatever an artist says is art? you are giving authority to the artist, but shouldn’t the artist need to establish some first?
Sorry, idiot was improper. I should have been consistent in my use if the word ignorant throughout. They are just ignorant.
Your capital “A” art is just a social construct. Just as the way you are using literature is not truly proper as well. It has popularly been used to just mean written works of which scholars have deemed of some societal value, but it can refer to just about any written work. Even a “trashy” romance novel.
The Whistler case was the British legal system.
No, I’m no artist. I’m just a simple man with a good memory and a college education. I suppose I believe that the artist has the right to define art because my professors taught this, but it also just makes sense to me. The artist is the one creating the piece. They don’t get to decide whether it will be great or sought after art, but it’s still their right to say it’s art. Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting in his entire life, and that was towards the end of it. Does that mean he wasn’t creating art for many years?
When you name a child at his/her birth you can choose the spelling. I could have a son and name him James. On his birth certificate I could spell it QRB. Would this make me a fool? More than likely, yes. No one that looked at QRB on paper would pronounce it as James. That still doesn’t change the fact that his name would be James spelled QRB.
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