ART DEALING

Who Cares for You? You're Nothing but a Pack of Cards! on display

By BEVERLY BRYAN
VIEW STAFF WRITER


 

When animator and artist Cristina Natsuko Paulos was a little girl, she spent her summers with her maternal grandmother in Chiba, Japan, outside Tokyo. It was at her grandmother's that she first saw the hanafuda playing cards that inspired her first solo show as a painter, now on display at The Fallout gallery in Commerce Street Studios downtown.

Paulos' mother is Japanese and her father Portuguese. She uses the cards to explore the intersection of those two cultures.

Paulos' grandmother gave her the beautiful pack of cards and she kept them. She was always fascinated with the suits representing the flowers of different seasons, but she never knew their history until a few years ago when her father found them and began to reminisce about playing the game when he lived in Hawaii.

The artist became as intrigued by the history of the cards as an adult as she had been by their beauty as a child. She learned that the Japanese deck was based on an older dragon deck the Portuguese brought to Japan that was later outlawed. The dragon cards have been lost forever, but they weren't quite forgotten inside Japan and enthusiasts recreated the cards, replacing the nautical dragon deck's sea monsters and ships with themes they considered appropriately Japanese, such as nature and poetry. There are a variety of games that can be played with the cards, but points are always assigned according to the picture on the card.

An aunt on Paulos' father's side remembered a Portuguese deck, but Paulos said "No one really knew much about the cards because it was kind of erased."

Hanafuda's popularity has spread to other Asian countries, such as Korea, where there are slight differences in the game. It also is popular in places where Asians immigrate, such as Hawaii -- a long way from Portugal. Paulos says there are now museums in Hawaii dedicated to the hanafuda cards.

The title of Paulos' show, Who Cares for You? You're Nothing But a Pack of Cards!, is taken from Lewis Carroll. At the end of "Alice in Wonderland," Alice says those words to a swarm of cards as they attack her. Paulos chose the title because it reflects the way the hanafuda cards and the Portuguese cards they're based on have traveled through time -- unsung, but gathering their own unique history.

"The cards have influenced so many different cultures," she said.

In her artist's statement, Paulos wrote that she is exploring "how cultures are fused together and oftentimes forgotten and erased during history's many re-writes."

Paulos uses symbolism to convey these thoughts in the paintings. In "Flutter Away Little Cards" two female figures stand with a flurry of cards swirling between them. One wears a European gown from another century, and one eye is actually the flower Portuguese coins once bore. The other wears a kimono and has a cherry blossom eye. The two figures appear repeatedly in this show and are sometimes joined together by pieces of string, a literal common thread.

The small paintings (all less than a square foot) represent each of the 48 cards in the hanafuda deck. They're done on different types of wood from Nevada and California using acrylic, graphite, colored pencil and sumi ink, a thick ink from Japan.

Born in the San Fernando Valley of California, Paulos' family migrated to Las Vegas one at time over the years. After living in Las Vegas for the past six years, Paulos plans to move to New York in June. She graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a degree in character animation and her animated films have screened at festivals in New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas.

She also has shown her paintings in smaller group shows at galleries like the Funkhouse, a gallery and antique shop owned by First Friday founder Cindy Funkhouser. But Paulos might never have done this solo show if she hadn't mentioned her idea for a series of paintings based on the hanafuda cards to Funkhouser a couple of years ago. Funkhouser remembered and offered Paulos her new gallery space in Commerce Street Studios as a venue if she completed the project. That encouragement inspired her to stop toying with the idea and do it. Paulos had been thinking about the series for two years, but completed it in two months.

At the time of the interview she was working on set of handmade hanafuda cards that visitors to The Fallout gallery could play with or buy during May's First Friday.

She feels the theme of the show is something everyone can relate to. "Even though we are so different, we can take this pack of cards and play a game, and we will love it because it's fun," she said.

Who Cares for You? You're Nothing but a Pack of Cards! will be on display at The Fallout, 1551 Commerce St., through June 2. There will be a closing reception on First Friday, June 1, from 6 to 10 p.m. For more information, call 269-3111.