Katsuhisa Sakai was born in a bomb shelter in Tateyama City, Japan during the last 6 months of World War 2. Today at age 69 he is an accomplished sculptor, living and working in Los Angeles, and exhibiting his artwork internationally. His works, mostly built of wood and stone utilize ancient building techniques, but are playful and modern.
I first met Sakai through his wife, Sonoko, who had been teaching me about traditional Japanese cooking and letting me photograph her. I got the chance to spend a weekend with them at their second home in Te- hachapi- a small Mojave desert town, where I was first exposed to his work and learned about his remote desert installations which had become part of local folklore to the few people who had stumbled upon them or sought them out. Having been intrigued by him for a bit, I got him to take a break from shipping his newest show to Germany to sit and talk about his life as an artist.
Patrick: You were living in Santa Monica for a long time, and now you’re split between Highland Park and Tehachapi. Can you talk about the dif- ferences in working in those three places?
Sakai: Well in the countryside there are no limits to how I can work. The biggest freedom I have is the time frame that I can work during because of all the noise that I make. When I was working in Santa Monica, you know I would have to stop at five o’clock because my neighbors would complain about the noise. I was basically nine to five.
P: Really?
S: Yeah, because it’s a quiet residential area. In Tehachapi I can wake up at two in the morning and do anything that I want.
P: Do you find Highland Park easier to work in than Santa Monica?
S: It’s about the same because this is a quiet neighborhood too, so it’s not easy to make a lot of noise.
P: I’m interested in your motivation to construct and leave large stone sculptures in the middle of the desert. What were you thinking when you started making these pieces?
S: Most importantly, in the desert there is nothing. The view is, how do you say it?
P: Uninterrupted?
S: Uninterrupted, yes. The view is very simple. It’s empty and I can do as I want. I don’t have to go out there and cut down trees, or do any land- scape work. Once I leave a piece in the desert, it becomes part of the landscape. The desert is like white paper. The sculpture stands out. You can see it from a long distance.
P: I was surprised how early I could see your Mojave sculpture as I was approaching it in my car. Once I did I was struck by the ways that the sculpture changed with the turning of my car and the landscape as I got closer to it. After I got to it I decided to go two miles away from it again and run the distance towards it so I could see it change at a slower, more human pace.
You’ve mentioned before that you’re interested in the way time changes your art and also the ways in which your art relates to the landscape around it.
S: Well basically, I want to control time. I’m talking about beyond my life span. I think those sculptures should last 500 years or maybe 1000 in the desert if they go untouched. Those rocks are old.
P: And you found them here in California?
S: Actually in Baja, but it’s basalt- volcanic rock and you can find it any- where.
P: How did you come to start using that?
S: Because it’s hard. It’s harder than granite. If a diamond is ten then basalt is eight, and granite maybe around six. So that is the best material I can use for making something that will last.
P: How is working with stone different for you than working with wood?
S: Well originally I started making sculptures with wood and I did that for a long time. I started showing these pieces in LA in the 80s, early 80s. Sometime around the turn of the century, around 2000, I wanted to start doing something different so I tried making wood sculptures that would last outdoors, so I started doing that and I spent like five or six years and I never sold any pieces, but they’re still standing, all those sculptures.
I sold one to a collector in Beverly Hills.
P: So working with rocks was something that happened later?
S: I had been going through some books on stones, from a technical point of interest and I had been thinking about ancient Greek marble statues with their arms broken off and how many of them have holes where they are broken. I thought maybe those holes had something to do with how the limbs were connected to the bodies.
Around that same time I came across Isamu Noguchi’s book where he was talking about old Greek building techniques for creating tension with rods. That made me confident that I could develop the technique from there for my own purposes. After so much trial and error it started to work for me though I enjoyed the whole process of technical development. It gave me more freedom for my new ideas in making sculptures.
P: You incorporate drawing into your practice too.
S: That’s right.
P: You’ve mentioned before that sometimes the distance between drawing and sculpture is not so great.
S: Well it gets close sometimes yes.
P: Can you explain that a little more?
S: Well I started out- right after graduate school I was an experimental filmmaker. I was study- ing in the sculpture department but I didn’t make any sculptures at the time; most of my work was conceptual and I ended up making a film and actually I was teaching a class on video as an art medium. I never thought at that time that I would be making something with my hands.
P: You were used to dealing only with images.
S: Yes, and then I went on to get a job as a TV producer.
P: Here in LA?
S: No in Tokyo, and then when I moved to LA I was still doing that and one day I was thinking- see because TV work, no matter how hard I worked, once it aired, it was gone in one day. I wanted to make something more substantial, that would last longer, so that was when I first started think- ing about time versus images and ideas related to the actual physical nature of an artwork.
P: That’s interesting because film is dealing with the passage of time in a very apparent way, but I don’t think many people think about the passage of time when thinking about sculpture.
S: They are basically both the same. From my point of view: let’s say you see a movie, and the image- it stays in your mind. You come across a sculpture in the middle of the desert, that’s also an image.
P: Film deals with images as representations. I don’t see you as making representative images so much as you are making physical structures that expand our visual vocabulary with forms that are unique, but get us to make references to the past.
S: It’s like a human body. You meet someone and most of the time you don’t remember them so much. Sometimes you remember a person’s figure for some reason. My drawings are sort of the in between, the images that remain in my mind. In the 80s, for ten years I did sculpture drawings- one drawing a day, so i have 1000s of drawings that I’ve never shown to anyone. Back then, I moved around a lot so I did landscape drawings, and then I started using oil for economic reasons, but then there’s framing- everything is so expen- sive when you work with paper. Let’s say you do a 20” by 30” drawing on paper and you want to frame it, it’s not cheap. So the first time i thought about making a sculpture in the desert- the piece of land that I bought by the Salton Sea- I paid like 5000 dollars then it went down to 500 dollars and I wanted to get rid of it, but nobody wanted it and I asked the city to take it and they didn’t want it and so I thought maybe I should use the land for my art. That’s how I got the idea [laughs]. You know- $500, you can spend that much fram- ing one drawing.
P: How do you select the locations for your pieces now?
S: Well, after I finished the Mojave piece I decided that I wanted to connect the Salton Sea with Mojave, with maybe with five or six different pieces in between.
P: And that is still a work in progress?
S: [Laughs] yeah, that is my lifetime work.
P: Is there anything you want people to know
before making a trip to Mojave or The Salton Sea to find one of your sculptures?
S: Nothing. I think that they should go out there and have to try to find it a little bit, so there can be an element of mystery there. I want people to wonder what the hell it is; how it was made; who made it; why it’s out there.
These days, all of these small towns have artist communities and I was able to access this local artist community in the Salton Sea. When I introduced myself- I’m the one who made that thing, out there in the middle of nowhere, everyone knew me [laughs]. Well everyone know that piece but not me.
P: How did they react?
S: “Oh! We’re always talking about you.”
So making those kind of connections with people who I’ve never met, through my work, is interesting to me. Another time I found an article written about my Mojave piece in a geological society’s journal. They were so interested in finding out how it got there.
So you know art connects with the people, but not always alongside my intentions. I want to develop those connections a little bit more, for the rest of my life, and beyond.
P: Do you ever go back out to see either of them?
S: Yeah once in a while [laughs] when I get bored. I bring a razor blade and test all of the space between the stones. They never change or move. In the Salton Sea, too, they have earthquakes once in a while, so it’s surviving all of this earth movement, and it’s not mov- ing. There is a huge temperature differ- ence between the hottest day and the coldest day- it’s unbelievable. So far my intentions are working.
P: To make something that lasts?
S: Yes.
P: How did you end up in California?
S: I got this job in 1981 as a TV producer for TV Asahi Japanese language television. I had a one-hour live news show every- day and a half hour interview program once a month. I was so busy that I didn’t really have time to see artwork, and I didn’t really know if any art scene existed in LA. But I did have one artist friend here and he started telling me about this interesting art movement that was happening in LA.
P: How did you immerse yourself in that movement?
S: Well actually then I got my first stu- dio space in downtown LA. That was a big one, 3000 square feet, for like $280 a month. I think we were the first gen- eration of artists working there.
P: And how did you make the transition to being a full time artist?
S: Well, I started to feel like I was wasting my life, following other peo- ple’s lives. I wanted to seek my own path, not necessarily art, but some- thing that was my own. I wanted to do something just totally useless.
So after a few years I stopped making TV programs and focused on TV commercials because it was pure money and less regular so my time was freed up to make more art, and then eventually I was able to stop doing that too, and I started showing in LA, and then NY and I was doing well, but then the market crash came and the value of my artwork dropped.
My gallery in NY closed and I didn’t really know what to do. I didn’t want to go back to the TV world. I struggled, but somehow managed to survive as an artist. Being an artist is always a struggle.
P: Who were you influenced by back then? What kind of work were you into?
S: You know, mostly Robert Smithson.
P: Did you ever get to meet him?
S: No, but you know, Richard Serra was my teacher at Yale and he was
a good friend of Smithson. I remem- ber one day he came in looking re-
ally depressed and he started talking about his long friendship with Robert and then told us that he has died, in a plane crash. He was shooting one of his pieces from an airplane. I remember that day very clearly.
At that point too, I realized that the American art world was filled with drama: life, and death. People were putting their lives on the line for their work. I came from Japan and so I wasn’t yet capable of understanding the scale of American artwork- using airplanes to make work.
P: The commitment level here was more extreme than in Japan?
S: Yeah it’s like your whole life must be devoted to your work.
P: But when I think about Japanese artists, Mishima for instance- his way as an artist led him to kill himself. That seems extreme to me too.
S: Well you see Mishima was a survivor of a generation, a soldier generation. When the war [WW2] started, soldiers were being drafted but towards the end of the war college students were being drafted. He was one of those, some survived, some died, and he was very torn by that idea. I think a lot of people at that time lived with this conscience that if you didn’t die [in the war] well then you didn’t fulfill your duty as
a Japanese man, so it wasn’t just Mishima, but a whole World War 2 generation were born into a tragic time, but many of the artists of that lineage- they were very good.
Most of them were uneasy about the Japanese identity developed after World War 2. It tore a lot of people apart.
P: What Year were you born in?
S: I was born in 1945, just as the war was ending. I was born in a bomb shelter with only candlelight, in August, so for 6 months I was alive dur- ing the war. My mother would always tell me that it was a miracle that I was even born. There was so much bombing from the American war ships to the sea town where my family was so they escaped to a bomb shelter in the mountains. The ground shook the whole time we were there.
The culture I grew up in was so different. Even six years later in elemen- tary school there was no entertainment- no tv, no radio. We were still living in old Japanese ways, but everyone felt like we were supposed
to stop doing that- everybody was looking towards America. American culture started to influence our everyday lives, but our entertainment was still very much of prewar Japan. I remember soldiers coming back from the war and all they talked about was fighting, or surviving the war- those were the stories that you heard all the time, and you’d see all of these people on the streets with no hands or legs. I remember in elemen- tary school teachers who were still wearing the Japanese Navy uniforms because they didn’t have anything else.
It was a messy world, but I kind of liked it.
P: The tension?
S: Well sort of. I was still able to taste pre-war Japan, but the war had ended though we hadn’t developed our post World War 2 culture yet.
P: When did things start to get more Westernized?
S: Around the 60s. I clearly remember new things coming from Europe and America. Mostly I remember The Beatles.
P: Were you into them?
S: Yeah yeah I was into it, but there was a strong generation gap growing. Some people were embracing this new culture, but many were dealing with memories of the war and their losses. I had a lot of friends who grew up without fathers. You know, three million Japanese people died, three million in four years of war, so everyone had someone who died, or was killed.
P: In your family?
S: Yeah, my uncle. Even in the classroom there was a strong separation between those who didn’t have fathers and those who did.
P: It was stigmatized.
S: Yes and actually it led one of my friends to be a big time gangster. His childhood memories were so terrible. He went all the way and then got killed in a Yakuza fight.
P: Eventually you were drawn to come to America though. Why?
S: Well actually I went to art school in Tokyo and then after that I wasn’t sure what to do with my life so I got a job working in subway tunnels un- derground. This was the year Mishima committed seppuku. I remember one day coming up from underground and everyone was talking about it. I remember everything- the color of the air.
P: It was a heavy day.
S: Yeah, heavy day. Soon after I thought maybe I should try to get out- see what was going on in America so I applied for scholarships and I was admitted to a few schools, but I had to send them all letters telling them that I didn’t have any money, and I wouldn’t be able to come. Then Yale sent me an offer to attend with a full scholarship, and i said “OK.” It was an easy decision.
P: What were your first impressions when you got to the US?
S: Well I landed in San Francisco in 1971 and I was introduced to a local hippie commune. They came to pick me up at the airport, and that night I had my first joint.
P: What did you think about all that?
S: I thought- this is an interesting country. Everyone is friendly. That was the tail end of the hippie times. There were English people living on the commune too, so I met some English guys and then we headed out on a road trip to NY. Four guys, no, no three guys, two girls, or three boys and two girls crossing the country. I was the only Japanese person there. We slept together in sleeping bags. I thought, “this is a wonderful country.”
P: You spent a week with them?
S: Yeah we drove for about 10 days. That was an incredible experience. And when I got to New York and I walked into a bar- there was a middle- aged man sitting there- drinking by himself and he turned around to me and said, “Jap! Get the fuck out of here!”
P: How did you react?
S: I just pretended that I didn’t understand, but you know that wasn’t the only time it happened. A lot of people got killed- in America and in Japan so I understood that people were still feeling revengeful about the war.
P: How long do you think it took for that mentality to fade away?
S: Well, let's just say, if my son got killed in the war until I go and I'm gone that kind of thinking could stay around - at least a half a century, maybe 100 years, but if you think about it - 100 years is not so long.