From DiscoverNikkei.org
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Hirokazu Kosaka
Visual artist (b. 1948)
Hirokazu Kosaka was born in Wakayama, Japan in 1948. He received his BFA from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, California in 1970 and went on to earn his Masters degree from Columbia University in New York in 1980. Kosaka has also been ordained as a Buddhist priest by the Koyasan Hagyu Temple in Japan and is currently the director of visual arts and curator of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, California.
Works
- Ruin Maps (2002)
- "For his latest project, Ruin Maps, he's returning to a period from his childhood -- and inviting a group of first-generation elders from Los Angeles's Japanese-American community to do the same. The Ruin Maps are based on a school assignment Kosaka worked on in his third grade class more than four decades ago. For the present-day project, Kosaka asks the elders to draw from memory the communities of their childhood. These drawings are then enlarged to 36 x 36 inches and transformed into woodcut prints that are displayed together -- a giant map of the terrain of memories both shared and intensely personal."
- In/flux Installation: Ruin Map (Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia)
Exhibitions
- "Blue Phase Ceremony" (Los Angeles, Not a Cornfield Project, December 3, 2005)
- "On Saturday December 3, 2005 Hirokazu Kosaka, a Kyudo archer, will shoot an arrow on the Not A Cornfield site, signaling the end of the project's Gold Phase and ushering in the final Blue Phase. Kyudo - traditional Japanese archery- is a mobile form of the meditation zazen, and the firing of the arrow speaks to both the concept and the intentions of the Blue Phase. For this project has taken aim at revivifying a parcel of land at the historic center of our city and, having hit its target, it now opens up a space in which to consider the wider ramifications of our responsibilities and relationship to the earth."
- "From the Verandah: Art, Buddhism, Presence" (Los Angeles, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, October 5, 2003-January 4, 2004)
- "Kosaka, who was born in Japan and graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1970, is a Buddhist priest and master Zen archer. His works — included the 1994 exhibition ‘In the Mood’ at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art — explore memory, identity, and living in the present, a notion particularly suited to this exhibition."
- "Hirokazu Kosaka: In the Mood" (Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, August 7-September 25, 2004)