Bio
Saijo was born and raised in Los Angeles, and was influenced by media culture (i.e. books, television, movies, magazines). Saijo takes the approach of “open text” which takes an object, such as a book, transforms the material from sequential to spatial order, and opens up a space to create new meaning. His unconventional process often involves Xerox copy technology, office supplies, and building materials to construct art with a wide range of subject matter from mid-century modern architecture, WWII photos, cinema stills, imaginary landscapes, and the history of fashion.
Saijo rejects the notion of art as a fixed idea defined by history, and instead he reclaims history, and redefines it based on “human experience”. His work takes the form of installation, drawing, sculpture, and mixed media.
Saijo refers to the notion of “memory construction” as an entry point to understanding his complex body of work. Memory consists of a combination of feeling, words and image which shape our perception of reality. As a youth Saijo spent much of his time sailing with his father off the coast of Southern California. Such memories have manifested in his recent work which explores themes of loss, entropy, transformation, and the unconscious: represented by an oceanscape where the boundaries are blurred between the sky and the sea. Mythology and classic tales, like Homer’s Odyssey and Stories of the Seven Seas, are reduced to abstraction, thus leaving the viewer to weave their own meaning into the work, navigating through a personal dreamscape, and continuing on a journey between the familiar and the unknown. (Bleicher Golightly)
Mike Saijo was born in 1974, he attended Pasadena Art Center College of Design, and grew up in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles. He started out looking at many books and magazines and later influenced by graffiti art and Oshuji-Japanese calligraphy.
After high school he made his first ‘book piece’ using pages of the New Testament bible, and printing an image of Senator Daniel Innoye he found from a history book and began to make art about ‘making history‘.
Influenced by the tradition of ancient manuscripts, he copies information using a xerox copy machine onto old discolored pages of books creating a sense of the old, while venturing into the new. He maps out territories of knowledge from a wide range of resources and reworks them to operate on its own terms. For him it is an attempt to take ownership of the past, and effect how we see our present historical situation as we enter into moment of accelerated change and may experience memory loss.
He has exhibited at MOCA, and in the permanent collection at the Orange County Museum of Agriculture and Nikkei History at Cal State Fullerton, as well as University of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand. (MOPLA)
Mike Saijo explores the notions of “representation and history” by forming constructions and site-specific installations—with the text of actual book pages juxtaposing imagery of historical incidents and events which have had significant local impact. Together, image and text undergo a process of reduction and abstraction, combining to articulate the point that “now” is as much “history” as history is now.
The art-making process involves deconstruction, appropriation, and re-contextualization of text and image. Mike is interested in the continual process of decomposition of meanings which do not correspond to conventional, constructed “reality”, but at the same time create new meaning. His artistic choices are made through a combination of research, hypothesizing, and personal ethics guided by a certain intuitive logic where conventional thought may not apply. (Lens Scratch)
Mike Saijo uses an innovative process applying Xerox technology and pages from discarded books to create what can be viewed as post-modern conceptual painting. He juxtaposes textual fields with imagery of personal and historical significance often selected by an intuitive process. Saijo explores the notions of “distant reading” by manipulating the book from a sequential order to a spatial order and opens up the possibilities of interpretation. His constructions are derived from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of ’colloquial language’ that every sense can be expressed without having an idea how what each word means just as one speaks without knowing how single sounds are produced. (The Loft)
Education
1994-98 Pasadena Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA
1992-94 Pasadena City College, Pasadena, CA, Graphic Design / Fine Art
Awards and Honors
2012 Research Fellow, Institute for Arts and Olfaction, Los Angeles, California
2007 Columbia University Medical Center, Community Relations, New York, NY
2006 2nd Annual International Artists Festival in Thailand, Bangkok
2006 28th Annual Wallworks Juried Competition LA Artcore, LA Brewery Annex, Los Angeles, CA
2005 Public Art RFQ LAPD Headquarters, LA County Cultural Affairs Department, Los Angeles, CA
Preparator and Art Related Work
2012 Designed and built interior of Digital Divide Cafe
2011 Designed and built interior of Bleicher Gallery
2009-13 Teaching Private Art Lessons to Elderly and Autistic Young Adults
2009-12 Art Handler. James Corcoran Gallery
2009 Installer. Taiwanese Cultural Center, New York
2008 Lead Preparator. Asian Contemporary Art Fair, ArtLA.
2007 Lead Preparator. Asian Contemporary Art Fair
2006-07 Installer/Director of 207 Gallery. Inwood, New York
2004-05 Practical F/X Assistant. Special Effect Solutions
Bibliography
Interiors. 2012
Angeleno Magazine, Arts Issue. 2012
Acorn Newspaper. 2011
Studio Guest Interview (A Dream Deferred), by Tony Valdez, Fox 11 News Television. March 27, 2011
Los Angeles Times, Thursday Pick of the Week. 2011
Sowing Dreams, Cultivating Lives. University of California Press, 2009
Los Angeles Times, Sunday Home Section. 2009
Rafu Shimpo Newspaper. October 2008
Shelter Magazine. 2007
Upper Manhattan Arts Stroll, by Mike Fitelson, Manhattan Times. 2007
Artists at Work, by Carla Zanoni, Westside The Spirit. August 30, 2007
In a Doorway, a Gentle Call to Arms (Pollack Equation), by Carla Zanoni, New York Times. August 19, 2007
The Mathematics of Jackson Pollock on a Street Corner in Inwood, by Rachel Wolff, New York Magazine. August 6, 2007
New York Magazine, Art Candy. July 2007
Manhattan Times, Inwood Edition, by Mike Fitelson. July 12, 2007
Cal State Fullerton Inside Magazine. May 2007
Sowing Dreams, Cultivating Lives: Nikkei Farmers in Pre-World War II Orange County, by Michiko Tamura, Rafu Shimpo. February 10, 2007
Los Angeles Magazine, Design Issue. 2007
Let Go Magazine, Issue #2. 2007
At Home Magazine. 2006
2nd Annual International Arts Festival in Thailand, Catalog. Summer 2006
Canvassing the Future, Lifescape Magazine. 2006
Art LA, Catalog. January 2006
Mike Saijo, by Mia Taylor, The Book LA. Spring 2005
Contact
MIKE.SAIJO@GMAIL.COM
213-359-8746
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