#also sorry for ignoring everyone im actually still sick… 🤒

[tianshiisdead]

u may ask me ‘why do you never draw japan if japan is ur favourite’ well the answer to that is that i also hate him and throw him against the wall daily. do i love him more than i hate him? who knows.

But, I do think it’s a little sad i never get around to Japanposting. i have a lot of thoughts, a lot of fascination, some of it a little morbid. Japan lies at the center of my historical interests and yet never quite within them: colonialism in Northeast Asia and postcolonial modernity. Even when outside of the room and not in the conversation, its presence is always looming just beyond the margins, always heavy, and usually bitter. I’m fascinated with what colonialism did to East Asia, and what colonialism did to Japan, the metropole. I’m fascinated by the rocky road to modernity and the ways nonwestern imperialism dresses itself in the language of liberation. I’m fascinated, if equally disgusted, by the gendering of nations and ethnicities in the eyes of both its self and other, the national-relations-as-romance depictions in then-popular propaganda films, in the blurry margins of intra-regional popular culture movements in wartime, and the cultures that emerge from surviving under a colonization that must have felt as though it would never end.

And when I think about it and consider painting, it leaves me a little wistful but also a little lost on how to approach art of Keekoo. I study this history’s shadow, I build my thoughts through a series of absences, I view it by viewing what it has done and the things it’s created - and destroyed. But… I am interested! I have a lot of strong feelings about this character. His contradictions are fascinating to me, even a little intimate. I worry I build him too much from my own viewpoint, poisoned by my family’s history as colonized, I worry that when I carve out what I think he should be I can’t help but focus too much on the shadows created rather than the object itself creating them.

But angst aside I do want to come up with a painting focusing on Kiku and Japan itself and not just having him ominously off screen somewhere LOL