Flower power
Cristina Natsuko Paulos cultivates the art of Japanese playing cards
|
||
|
Advertisement |
IN LAS VEGAS, playing cards always involve risk and reward, danger and inducement, bad luck and good fortune. Rarely does a deck of cards involve any aesthetic consideration -- unless, of course, you consider those adults-only packs that boast images of naked women to be aesthetic rather than erotic. In any case, gamblers tend to emphasize the suit and number on the face of each card, because that's where one's prosperity lives or dies. Las Vegas artist Cristina Natsuko Paulos, however, asks us to ponder the potential for beauty on the back of 48 hanafuda cards that she has assembled for her new show, Who Cares for You? (You're Nothing but a Pack of Cards!)
Hanafuda, which means "flower cards," is a Japanese card game that actually evolved from an earlier 48-card game introduced by the Portuguese. The Japanese replaced the Western visual motifs with flowers, seasonal images and poetry in an effort to eliminate all Western influences from the game back in the 17th century. Paulos, who is of Portuguese and Japanese descent, first learned about hanafuda as a small child when she discovered a deck of flower cards in her grandmother's house. As she learned more about the game, her curiosity heightened, culminating in a series of gorgeous oversized cards starring twin sisters who pose sullenly amid a landscape of seasonal flowers. (A variation of hanafuda is still played today in Hawaii and Korea.)
But Who Cares for You? isn't a strict re-creation of hanafuda. There's a touch of Lewis Carroll's psychedelic weirdness to the proceedings, confirmed by Paulos' artist's statement, which includes a line from Alice in Wonderland: "At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her; she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face."
Carroll's image of a pack of cards fluttering like autumnal leaves fuels much of Paulos' own hanafuda renderings. Like Alice, the twin sisters of Who Cares for You? are sometimes at peace and sometimes at odds with the (un)natural world around them. Usually, each sister has an eye encircled with a different kind of petal. At other moments, one eye is enlarged, bigger than the other, staring at the viewer with a morose expression. Either way, these simple, elegant images convey all the timeless delicacy of a haiku poem, paper crane or succulent sushi boat.
"February, Plum with Nightingale," for instance, shows the sisters cheek to cheek, their long black hair flowing in the wind while a bird is perched on a branch above, singing for the end of winter. "April, Wisteria with Cuckoo," meanwhile, captures one of the sisters lassoing the blue bird in question, its color contrasted against a red tanzaku (or kite), trapped either by the wind or the girl's sinister intent. And in a darker vein, "August, Pampas with Full Moon," the sisters stand beneath a red sky, a pink sun melting into a jet-black mountain. Finally, to cap off the last season of the year, "December, Plain Paulownia C," the sisters are frozen into ice-blue figures, waiting patiently for the return of spring and to be thawed.
There are other works on display besides cards. Paulos offers paintings inspired by the Portuguese-influenced "dragon cards," including "Ties That Bind," a tug-of-war between the girls that incorporates an actual piece of string or twine into the piece. These are lovely works that continue to showcase the sisters, only with dragons instead of seasonal flowers. Here, too, Paulos reinterprets and reintroduces the card decks that had been extinguished by a resurgent Japanese nationalism. She holds true to her statement to "explore how cultures are fused together and oftentimes forgotten and erased during history's many rewrites." Paulos provides her own revision, using a little-known form of East-meets-West entertainment: hanafuda.
Indeed, Who Cares for You? is that rare kind of multicultural art that speaks to everyone, from gaming enthusiasts to students of Japanese culture, from historians to anime and manga enthusiasts. It doesn't hurt that The Fallout is a lovely new gallery located in what is otherwise deemed the more industrial side of the Arts District near the train tracks. The Fallout is definitely worth checking out, and the beauty of the gallery's second show suggests that there are more noteworthy exhibits to come -- spring, summer, fall and winter.
Who Cares for You? (You're Nothing by a Pack of Cards!): Work by Cristina Natsuko Paulos
Through June 1
The Fallout
1551 S. Commerce St.
269-3111 or www.thefallout.net
Free