Junko Chodos

JUNKO CHODOS
Birth name	Junko Takahashi
Born	1939 Tokyo Japan
Nationality	Naturalized U.S. citizen
Field	Fine Art,
Training	Waseda University & State University of New York
Movement	Centripetal Art

Junko Chodos (born 1939) is a contemporary Japanese-American artist residing in the United States. Her works represent an unusually wide variety of techniques and styles, ranging from close, very detailed and painstaking work with pencil, pen, and collage, to more gestural works done with acrylic.

Her evolving artistic output reveals the influence of Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Mathis Grünewald, the Italian Futurists, and the master calligraphers of Japan. She has an appreciation of a number of the world’s great religions, including Buddhism, Shinto, Christianity, and Judaism, an awareness complemented by curiosity about technology, biology, and the natural environment.

Chodos has had solo exhibitions featured at the Tokyo Central Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Pasadena Pacific Asia Museum, and numerous other museums and galleries in Japan and in the United States.

Life and career

Junko Chodos was born Junko Takahashi in Tokyo, Japan, in 1939. She grew up in a highly cultured and well-educated family amid the turbulence of World War II. Early experience of the destructiveness of war would profoundly affect both her life and her art. She grew up in a household where both Buddhism and Christianity were strong influences. She was a member of the first post-war generation of "commoners" allowed to attend the Gakushuin, the Imperial school.

Chodos pursued art from a young age and enrolled at Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University in 1963, where she majored in Eastern and Western art history and the philosophy of art. She also took an interest in the writings of German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and studied under Prof. Shigeo Ueda, noted translator of Buber into Japanese.

Chodos graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in Art History and Philosophy. Her graduation thesis was titled: "Spirituality in Line: Interrelationship of Art and Religiosity."

Considered disrespectful, and forbidden to be an artist, Chodos left everything she knew and came to California ...calling herself a “spiritual refugee,”

In an article in the Winter 2003 issue of CrossCurrents, the Journal of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life, Chodos wrote:

"To seek justice, to be courageous, to be ethical in other words, to choose rational universal standards over loyalty towards the group is to be a traitor in Japan, and these individuals break the biggest taboos of the totalitarian society. I experienced these aspects of Japanese society as a form of persecution and as a threat to my own integrity.That is why I left Japan and became a spiritual refugee."

In 1968 Chodos studied at the State University of New York, Buffalo. In 1971 she married lawyer and author Rafael Chodos, the son of a rabbi.

In 1988, Chodos became naturalized U.S. citizen.

In 2002, Chodos published: "Metamorphoses: The Transformative Vision of Junko Chodos", a catalog of the one-person exhibition of the art of Junko Chodos at the Long Beach Museum of Art in the Fall of 2001. The book featured full-color high-quality reproductions, and five critical essays. The works included a range from the tiny collages inside CD jewel boxes, to the largest mylars included in her "Esoteric Buddhism" series. The book won `Best Art Book of the Year - First Prize from Independent Publishers in 2002.

In the late 1990s, Junko Chodos coined the term "Centripetal Art" to describe her style of art, which she defined as art created by an artist who strives towards her center and encounters divine presence there.

She has founded a new movement in art which goes beyond post-modernism. She calls it "Centripetal art" and defines it as art which seeks the inner center in order to encounter divine presence there. This new kind of art was born out of her life-long spiritual journey and her enormous body of work.

In 2005 the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in Missouri presented 30-year retrospective of her work - "Junko Chodos: The Breath of Consciousness". The exhibition title references a recurrent image in her work, the lungs. In part originating in her personal history (a childhood battle with tuberculosis), this prevalent metaphor also takes on universal resonances, signaling the significance of breathing in the world's faith traditions-as a connection to life itself, and as a vehicle to practices of meditation, contemplation, and inner awareness.

The earliest works included in the exhibition are exquisitely complex drawings of roots and dead flowers that evince both microcosmic and macrocosmic scale: Chodos elicits worlds of complexity from mundane subjects, leading the viewer to notice anatomical, architectural and theological associations. Similarly, Chodos' collages combine a density of myriad elements in a barely held stasis. It is a dynamic of turbulence and repose, as details are resolved into larger systems: ribcages and lungs arise from images of engines and horseshoe crabs, layered with quotations from Renaissance paintings. The exhibition includes select works from the 1991 series, Requiem for an Executed Bird, a powerful body of work that delves into the horror of violence, using a bird as a transformational symbol of innocence that falls prey to injustice and cruelty, but ultimately achieves hope and resurrection. The survey is completed by large scroll-like paintings on mylar. These works reveal the influence of the strong gestures of the American Abstract Expressionists and the spare, concentrated aesthetic of the calligraphers of Chodos' native Japan.

Terrence E. Dempsey, S.J. the Director MOCRA wrote about Chodos' work:

" Junko Chodos stands out among today's artists for her unflinching look at life in its fullest sense. She embraces the sacred and the profane, uncovers beauty in ugliness, and maintains an openness to discovering hope and peace in a world of struggle and hardship.."

In 2010, Chodos was honored by being named a Fellow of the Society for Art, Religion and Contemporary Culture.

Works viewable Online (may be subject to copyright restrictions)

Mandala image: http://www.chodos.com/centripetalart.nsf/vGNCNTByDocKey/PP7F86D6B22731/$FILE/Mandala_Full2.jpg

And for the detail from that image: http://www.chodos.com/centripetalart.nsf/vGNCNTByDocKey/PP45FB82C83531/$FILE/Mandala_dtl2_big.jpg

More works can be seen at http://www.CentripetalArt.com on the Gallery Page

Selected Public Collections

Central European University (Budapest) 2008 Individuation Journal, No. 7 (1995)

Fresno Art Museum 2005 Giant Burls, No. 5 (1989)

Long Beach Museum of Art 1991 Burls Series, No. 18 (1988) 1994 Interplanetary Icon, No. 9 (1990) 1998 Celestial Curtain, No. 1 (1988)

Pacific Asia Museum (Pasadena, California): 1995 Dead Flower Series, No. 8 (1974)

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2006 FATHOM - collaboration with MalashockDance. Dance program based on the life of Kuukai, 9th Century Buddhist priest. Composer Ariel Blumenthal.

2005 Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California, Junko Chodos: Translucent Meditations. One-person show given as part of Council of 100 Distinguished Woman Artist of the Year award.

2005 Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, St. Louis, Missouri, Junko Chodos: The Breath of Consciousness.

2003 Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, Requiem for an Executed Bird, at the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library, through Feb. 15, 2004.

2002 Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Junko Chodos: A Passionate Witness

2001 Long Beach Museum of Art, Metamorphoses: The Transformative Vision of Junko Chodos

1995 Pacific Asia Museum (Foyer Gallery), In the Forest of Amida Buddha, Pasadena, California

1992 L.A. Artcore Annex, Art, Mysticism and Psychology, Curated by Rafael Chodos. Los Angeles, California.

Space Gallery, Junko Chodos Painting, Los Angeles, California

1988 Frank Bustamante Gallery, Junko Chodos Recent Works on Paper, New York, New York. L.A. Artcore, Los Angeles, California.

1984 Fujii Garo Art Salon, The Universe Moves and Humans Dance: Junko Chodos One-Person Show, Tokyo, Japan

1983 Studio Gallery 6, Laguna Beach, California

1979 Gallery Nakatsumi, Staring at Inner Light: Junko Chodos One-Person Show, Osaka, Japan

Tokyo Central Museum, Staring at Inner Light; Junko Chodos One-Person Show, Tokyo, Japan

1973 Alibrandi Bottega of Art, First One-Person Show of the Artist Junko Chodos, Boston, Massachusetts

Selected Group Exhibitions

2006 Fresno Art Museum, Eighteen Profiles: Distinguished Women Artists of California, Fresno, California

1997 Long Beach Museum of Art, Roadmaps: Structure, Process and the Collection, Long Beach, California

1996 Asian American Arts Center, "Passion and Compassion: Five Artists' Reflections on Buddhism", New York, New York

1995 Long Beach Museum of Art, Crossing Currents (Permanent Collection Show), Long Beach, California

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Invitational Art Auction, Santa Monica, California, U.S.A.

SPACE Gallery, One Vision, Los Angeles, California.

1994 Long Beach Museum of Art, New Acquisitions Show, Long Beach, California

1993 Couturier Gallery, Present Art, Los Angeles, California

1992 Couturier Gallery, Present Art, Los Angeles, California.

Long Beach City College Gallery, The Sticking Place: Space and Image in Contemporary Collage, Curated by Peter Frank. Long Beach, California.

Olga Dollar Gallery, Collage/Assemblage, Curated by Edward Lau. San Francisco, California.

Long Beach Museum of Art, New Acquisitions, Long Beach, California.

1991 Fleck-Ellman Gallery, Aspen, Colorado

1990 Space Gallery, Accretions, Collage and Assemblage, Los Angeles, California.

Gallery SHO, San Francisco, California.

Grand Canyon College, A.P. Tell Gallery, Expressions of Faith IV Phoenix, Arizona.

1989 Lancaster Museum/Art Gallery, California Collagists Lancaster, California. Grand Canyon College, A.P. Tell Gallery, Expressions of Faith III, Juried by Bruce D. Kurtz. Phoenix, Arizona.

1988 New York University, Twelfth Annual Small Works Competition, New York. Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina. Grand Canyon College, A.P. Tell Gallery, Expressions of Faith II,Phoenix, Arizona.

1987 Art 54 Gallery, International Art Competition winner, New York. Juried by Janet Salz.

1984 Laguna Beach Museum of Art, Laguna Beach, California. Juried by Henry Hopkins. All California Winner.

1981 Galeria Artica, Cuxhaven, West Germany.

Other media

"Cry of Ecstasy" - A Film by Robert Primes. Malcolm Goldstein Responds to the Art of Junko Chodos (DVD released 2005)

"Junko Chodos - The Sketchbooks" (2001), CD-ROM published by Giotto Multimedia [giottomultimedia.com].

"Requiem for an Executed Bird" (1999) - Interactive CD-ROM produced by Giotto Multimedia and designed by Aswan Karapetian.

"Junko Chodos: A Spiritual Artist for the New Renaissance Age" (1992), videotape produced and directed by William Barnett, c. 20 minutes.

"Junko Chodos: Art, Mysticism and Psychology" (1992) videotape produced and directed by Rafael Chodos, c. 18 minutes.

Further reading

Cara Hopkins, "Painting with Sound", Colorado Daily, August 20, 2002.

Cara Hopkins, "Junko Chodos: Spiritual Refugee", Colorado Daily, June 25, 2002

William Wilson, "Junko Chodos Finds a Way 'In the Forest'", Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1995.

Peter Frank, in "Art Pics of the Week", L.A. Weekly, May 12–18, 1995

Mac McCloud, "Stuff and Presence", Visions , Los Angeles, California, Summer 1993.

James Scarborough, "Junko Chodos," Visions, Los Angeles, California, December 1992., pp. 52–53.

Peter Frank, "Art Pick of The Week," LA Weekly, Los Angeles, California, October 23-October 29, 1992.

James D. Williams, et al., The Interdisciplinary Reader, pp. 621, 624; Harper Collins Publications (1992)

Noriko Gamblin, "Junko Chodos," Visions, Los Angeles, California, Summer 1991.

Bill Lasarow, "Junko Chodos," ArtScene, Los Angeles, California, February 1991.

Mac McCloud, "Junko Chodos and Roy Herweck at LA Artcore," Visions, Los Angeles, California, Winter 1990.

Suvan Geer, "Art Reviews," Los Angeles Times, Calendar section, July 13, 1990.

Suzanne Lummis, "Into the Mystic: Junko Chodos' Interplanetary Icons," Los Angeles Downtown News, July 9, 1990.

Suzanne Lummis, "Can We Trace the Common Threads Now Woven Into Women's Art?" Los Angeles Downtown News, April 9, 1990.

David Pagel, "Lifting the Curtain: Junko Chodos," Visions, Los Angeles, California, Fall 1988.

Cynthia H. Craft, "Century Gallery Showcases Art, the Environment," Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1998.

Bijutsu Techo, Japanese monthly art magazine, June 1988., “News from Abroad”

“Staring at the Light Beyond the Darkness”, Asahi Shimbun satellite edition, New York and Los Angeles, April 8, 1988

Amaury Saint-Gilles, "Art: People and Places," Mainichi Daily News, Tokyo, Japan, September 20, 1984.

"Junko Chodos One Person Show," Mainichi Shimbun, Tokyo, Japan, September 20, 1984.

“The Globe of the Earth is the Canvas”, in People, Asahi Shimbun, September 6, 1984,

“Junko Chodos Collage”, Geijutsu Shincho, Japanese monthly art magazine, June 1980

"Junko Chodos' Show," Mainichi Shimbun, Osaka, Japan, December 5, 1979.

"Rich, Dense Beauty," Kobe Shimbun, Osaka, Japan, December 4, 1979.

"Exhibition: Junko Chodos' One-Person Show," Mainichi Shimbun, Tokyo, Japan, November 1979.

"Finding Self in Encounter with Root: Japanese Woman Who Lives in America has One-Person Show," Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, Japan, November 15, 1979.

"Staring at Inner Light: Finding the Universe in a root," Sekkai Nippo, Tokyo, Japan, November 17, 1979.

“It's The Way of the Devil”, Bob Garrett, Sunday Herald-Advertiser, Boston, Massachusetts, January 21, 1973

External links

Junko Chodos Art and Ideas http://www.junkochodos.com/