PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to welcome Japanese artist Wakana Kimura in her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Journey to the West: Alien of Extraordinary Ability. The classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, attributed to Wu Cheng’en, is a tale of pilgrimage, hardship, and loss. It tells the story of the Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, who travels West to gather sacred texts, encountering many challenges and enduring great suffering throughout their passage. Tang Sanzang is not alone on this pilgrimage; he has guardians to protect as well as demons to obstruct. This legendary tale parallels the 7th-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, whose travels to the Western regions (India) took 17 years, resulting in a collection of original Sanskrit texts conveyed to China on the backs of scores of mules. The title of Wakana Kimura’s exhibition Journey to the West: Alien of Extraordinary Ability offers homage to this extraordinary tale. Kimura presents a personal story, in pictorial majesty, of her journey West, but for her story, West is Los Angeles, California. In Kimura’s chronicling, her odyssey is of a young Japanese woman who leaves her culture and home, moves to Los Angeles, goes to school, works, lives, and learns the language and culture of a country and region unfamiliar to her. She receives a visa, then a green card, identifying her as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.” Metaphorically retracing the rewards and hardships of the Journey to the West, she blazes her future. Her demons and guardians are front and center in this exquisite body of paintings, not as a threat or regret but as a powerful reimagining of retaining and transcending identity. Kimura’s unique studio practice is a symbolic mash-up of East and West, graffiti, and Japanese Buddhist Mandala painting. She employs hybrid Buddhist iconography and mythological characters from many cultures, mixing them in her loose, brushy drawings and paintings of mixed metaphors. Her contemporized figures are cloaked in hot colors, genderless, and exaggerated with distorted time lines and mismatched cultures. Her work also speaks of the migration of culture, as people sought safety from India to China, to Korea, and Japan; how cultural accommodation was shaped by the impact of multiple wars, dominated by warring patriarchies. Understanding the recondite paintings of Kimura is its own journey through symbolic language. Wakana Kimura | Sonzo | acrylic and vinyl paint, markers on Udagami paper, mounted on silk and gold brocade, backing papers, stored in a paulownia wood box, signed On view in the exhibition will be Wakana Kimura’s Guardian portraits mounted on scrolls by the Master Hyogushi and Japanese National Treasure, Shosaku Yoshimura. Mr. Yoshimura is a third-generation hyogushi (master scroll and screen mounter), one of only a handful of hyogushi who are allowed to repair and restore Japanese national treasures. The collaboration between Mr. Yoshimura and Kimura is unique; an octogenarian, he agreed to come out of retirement to design and mount her paintings because he valued her vision and relished the challenge of melding a centuries-old tradition with a contemporary artist’s vision of Buddhist iconography. The paintings are on Udagami paper, traditionally produced in Yoshino, Nara Prefecture, a type of pure mulberry paper containing white clay derived from crushed limestone found in the region. The white clay serves multiple purposes, including preventing transparency, repelling insects, acting as an antioxidant (protection against burning), and maintaining elasticity. Uda paper is recognized as the finest Japanese paper, often used for the restoration of cultural properties. Wakana Kimura | LA Mandala | 2023 | watercolor, sumi ink, marker, acrylic & vinyl color on paper | 314 x 102 inches (four panels, 102 x 79 inches each Along with the stunning scrolls will be a large mural, LA Mandala, exhibited during the 2023 City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Independent Master Artist Project (COLA) exhibition. We expect the 314-inch-wide painting, comprising four panels, to span the length of the gallery’s first room. We're also pleased to announce that Wakana Kimura's select scroll paintings will be on view in our booth at Untitled Art Fair in December 2024. Wakana Kimura was born in 1978 in Izu, Shizuika, Japan. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Japan. She received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2011 and a BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2002. Kimura is the recipient of the 2023 COLA Independent Artist Project, Los Angeles; the 2017-2020 Robertson Recreation Center mural from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles; and in 2013, she received a commission from the Los Angeles Metro, Through the Eyes of the Artist. Museum exhibitions include RSVP Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; IMA, Hinokisoken, Museum Meiji-Mura, Aichi, Japan; and Invoke, Udatsu no Kogei Kan Museum, Fukui.