Interview with TWOONE
Hiroyasu Tsuri aka TWOONE is still trying to find out who he is. For him, evolution is key and allows creative freedom without needing to define himself. It’s much more exciting – stagnation is foe.
Hailing from Japan, TWOONE made his way to Melbourne, Australia after high school. Melbourne was a city unknown, which made him even more determined to make the move. Over a decade after that move, TWOONE is now known the city over. His pieces, like his creations for his first solo show One Thousand Cans, captured the imagination of the viewer, not only for its concept, but for the sheer amount of creative detail.
TWOONE’s start was in street art, emanating from his graffiti and skateboarding influence. His works originally – and still do – grace the streets of Melbourne. A walk to the corner of Brunswick and Johnston Street in Fitzroy, and you will find the giant portrait by Adnate and TWOONE – the girl wearing a headscarf is a Fitzroy icon.
Now based in Berlin, TWOONE’s world is a forever evolving. He visited fluoro HQ on a recent trip to Melbourne to discuss his iconic works, artistic evolution, the concept of ‘finished’ and ‘unfinished’ art, and chance encounters.
fluoro. In your words… who are you and what do you create?
TWOONE. I’m still trying to find out who I am. I guess I like to keep changing, so I don’t really want to define myself. Change is much more exciting.
f. Your upbringing? How did this impact your artistic evolution and how you create?
T. Well… visually, as a child my parents were teachers, so they always would bring back some materials that I always kept. I had brothers and sisters, and we all kept all the materials we were given to create bits and pieces. We had a lot of pencils and paint as well, so we did a lot of painting too. I always liked making things or building things. That was interesting.
I went to TAFE in Melbourne and when I went there they taught me about different materials as well. I still use some of those materials I was taught about, but since then technology has really developed. If you’ve got something that you’re interested in, you can just YouTube it and you pretty much know how to use it.
Sculpture was always my thing. But how have my things changed? The first thing to notice is visual changes. I try to use different materials because when I use different materials, rather than me trying to recreate what I do in other mediums, I try to play with it. Each medium has its own strength and different behavior so I try to enhance and play with it. This helps me create new styles. Pencil and watercolour behave very, very differently, obviously, so that’s how I try to make change. Even the process of creation… sometimes I make a sketch and make a painting, sometimes I do paintings without any sketches or sometimes I’ve got a very finished idea and I try to work with it.
I just try not to define my process, or medium or even the style to one thing. In practice, I think that’s how I make changes.
f. You mentioned ‘finished’ and the idea of finished art. Your pieces are really raw and open. Is that purposeful? Have you decided as an artist that you want your work to be open in this way?
T. I think I like the idea of my pieces being open. I think that when we say ‘finished’, a lot of people may picture a very polished, maybe almost like graphic design, perfect picture.
I am definitely not interested in that for my aesthetic because there are so many people who can do it much better, and it’s just not a form that I think is most interesting. Even when it’s open, there are so many things that you can actually put it in…
Over the last three of four years, well actually since I started showing my work in Melbourne, it was much more illustrative based. These pieces were heavily influenced by graffiti, very street art type of style. But at that time, I started feeling that was a little too limiting and it wasn’t really fitting to how I would like to express myself. Just before I left Melbourne I’ve been trying to part ways with that style and in that process I’ve tried new methods, which is about changing artistically. I guess I do move a lot, I meet new people, see new things, and that definitely feeds into who I am and what I produce as well.
f. Skateboarding culture and graffiti influenced you. Did you ever graffiti write?
T. Yes, they definitely triggered me to get into this much more.Yeah a little bit, I did a lot back in 2005 to 2008…
f. Skateboarding and graffiti is, historical, quite strongly linked with the US. Why did you move to Australia and not to a US state like California or a city like Philly or LA?
T. It’s because I had never heard of Melbourne before. Originally I came to Melbourne just after I finished high school in Japan and I wanted to study English.
When Japanese people try to go overseas to study, usually the US is the first choice, and somehow I was a bit twisted – when you’re a teenager it’s a bit like that right? So I didn’t want to go to somewhere everyone goes, so not to the US or England, which is always the second place. Australia is relatively popular place to go as well, but most people go to Sydney or Brisbane or the Gold Coast. I don’t know why but Melbourne wasn’t on the map, so I just came here. Less people chose it.
f. How was it first coming to Melbourne?
T. It was great and yeah and little bit of a culture shock. I couldn’t speak much English and there are a lot of different things, but I didn’t have anything to lose so I just went along with pretty much everything that was presented to me. I had a great host family. They saw me with a skateboard when I arrived, so they took me to a skate park the next day. It was really nice.
f. Tell us about your first Melbourne show?
T. The first gallery show was my first solo show. It was the One Thousand Cans show and that was a really good time. I did it over the course of two and a half years…
f. And now you focus on the animal form? Where did this come from?
T. Originally, when I was doing a lot of spray painting on the street I painted a lot of elephants and that was some kind of character that came out of my imagination. I had this dream of an elephant, a talking elephant, and that’s why I was painting it.
I think I like how animals have got much more variety of forms than humans, and I think that’s why I like to paint them. But I still paint them a lot because they are quite a good symbol that can be translated into a lot of different cultures, and it’s depending on what age you are, and who you are. People translate things differently.
f. Elephants are positive.
T. And negative sometimes…
f. How?
T. Some of the animals, let’s say a snake, spiders, or even goats are sometimes associated with negativity and then other times positivity. That really depends on the particular religion, or view, or where you come from. And I find that quite interesting because there are a lot of things in the world… things are things, but people look at if from different angles and they take different messages from them.
I think that there’s some kind of truth in that, and I think that’s why I like making my pieces open rather than saying one strong statement: this is how I feel, this is the image … this is the thing.
f. And you let people interpret your work however they wish?
T. Yeah. I think that when I started there were a lot of things that came from my imagination and I just made up things, but obviously those things are affected by everyday life, and the more I do, the more I start realising. At the moment my inspiration is from everyday life, like people and experiences and things. So even though my pieces can be seen as open and vague, it’s some kind of representation of real life. The real life that I see.
f. Is that where your new series 100 Faces comes from? Real life?
T. Yeah. That’s definitely one of the things that is very much from real life. I’ve been painting portraits of people or the expression of a person, and I capture them originally on my sketchbook. It’s 100 faces. I’m already up to 95 so I’ll be finished soon.
f. Do you sketch on public transport, on the train?
T. Yeah on the trains, in the bus, when I’m waiting in the café or streets and stuff, especially when I’m travelling. My focuses are the people who are on trains, and some of them are my friends who I capture when we’re just sitting together… Some sketches only take a few seconds, some of them ten or so minutes.
These are people from all over the world because at the moment I get to travel to a lot of places. I lived in Australia for 10 years and now living in Berlin, so I go back and forth. I’m from Japan, so I try to go back once a year and also a few other projects take me to different cities and places, so I can capture a lot of different types of people. Especially on public transport … I quite like it because there’s a mix of people, different demographics, ages … there are a lot of people on the phone these days, it’s actually easier to capture them because they’re not paying attention.
f. If it wasn’t the phone, it was the newspaper.
T. Yeah, but I remember seeing a lot more people actually people watching and that was quite natural back in the day. Maybe 10-15 years ago without smartphones, maybe some people had a book or newspaper, but I’m pretty sure a lot more people were actually watching each other. I think that’s true. And it was normal.
f. Does technology impact your work?
T. I would say yes. I think because I do make some work on the computer sometimes, and also everything has become much more instant. You can capture things so much quicker. But I don’t know exactly how it’s impacting my work, but it’s hard not to I think.
f. When you’re travelling, do you ever take a photo of something that inspires you and then revisit it later?
T. I do that. Using a phone is the way to instantly capture a moment. If I know I really wanted a certain image for something or I just want it, then I use a phone.
But, for my art practice, I try to capture either by sketchbook or 35mm because I don’t have 100% control over it and somehow I quite like. I think that when you have 100 percent control over something, you don’t know if it’s good or important anymore. With sketches, you’re drawing the people on the street you don’t know when those people are going to leave, so you need to work in a certain way to capture what you need. I think there is a time your hand moves much more accurately and sometimes it doesn’t, but it doesn’t mean it’s a bad drawing, it’s just different lines and shapes and views. That 100 percent control, like taking photographs on the phone, putting filters in, changing the light and everything…I think is making more things look quite generic.
I think it comes back to changes in things, and I think changes are important because that’s how people push forward, either technology, even writing or anything creative.
f. Now after Melbourne, you back to Berlin, then returning in October 2016 for the 100 Faces show at Backwoods Gallery. What can we expect for the series?
T. The 100 Faces series contains portraits from my sketches and folders. Because of that filter process from the sketches or images to watercolour, it’s not so much of a realistic capturing of a portrait, it’s more of the atmosphere.
A lot of people are actually wanting some of the portraits and saying that they look like their friends or someone else’s, which makes sense to me because as I was working on this, I saw the faces over the course of two years. My aim with this series is to capture the portraits of this time.
I feel like it’s succeeding when people can actually relate in that way because a lot of people actually do probably look similar or dress similar and because of technology a lot of things could have a similar aesthetic. In this series, I also have got a few large sized paintings, 2.4 x 2.4. I’ve got four of them, one’s a triptych … so it’s huge. That’s kind of reflecting the world state at the moment and that’s a little bit of a darker one. At the time of its creation I was reading some newspapers and it’s hard not to feel that the whole world is moving to … pushing to war. It’s not upsetting me, it’s frustrating me because some of them are pushed by politics and the greed. That’s frustrating not really upsetting I think because we are doing it, nothing more than that.
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While TWOONE doesn’t expect one painting to change perception, politics or the world, he believes that if more people think about and reflect on the state of the world, it may just trigger that little something. Continuing on his journey of creation, using whatever medium, process or tool, each piece by TWOONE is an element of discovery and an open palette of interpretation.
100 Faces will be on show at Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne, Australia in October 2016. Stay tuned.
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