Nowhere by Diana H. Chu

NOWHERE / DIANA H. CHU

NOWHERE Diana H. Chu

Thesis Book Second Year MFA Illustration Practice Maryland Institute College of Art Fall 2017 - Spring 2018

ALOHA

NOWHERE / DIANA H. CHU

“I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I’d be good. I’d dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.” — Patti Smith

This Thesis book contains more than just process. It contains questions and experiments, my thoughts and life behind a year filled with poetry and drawings that capture pure, personal joy. The book begins in the summer of 2017 on an Eastward wind with nary a magic carpet in sight. Thanks for following my journey into the world of zines as I know it, moving through my new love for radio and performance, blossoming into my last year in MICA’s MFA Illustration Practice program whose heart ferociously beats in The Greatest City in America. Aloha, my darkling. Diana April, 2018

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

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Inexhaustive list of appropriate ways to interact with this compendium of text / images:

Touch it Feel it Listen to it Scribble on it Spread it Tip it over Wear it Ask it Divine it Move it Ice it Believe in it Put too many bookmarks in it Underline everything Hide it Ruin it Lick it Rinse it Give it away Hide behind it Lift it Drop it from a great height Never let it go

JUNE

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In June I saw Florence and Paris. In July I saw Maryland, Arkansas, Tennesse, Virginia, Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, and New Mexico.

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Before entering the MFA ILP program, I turned mostly to reading novels, poetry and finding inspiration on stretched canvases. I was particularly interested in transcendentalism, the Beat movement in American literature (the “jazz” of words) and wabi sabi of everyday life. In my Thesis proposal over the summer of 2017, I wrote about how I discovered my path into the realm of experimental comics. My thesis was going to consist of four (or more) personal narrative comics in the form of zines. I didn’t want to create comics that were traditional in the eyes of the mainstream. I am fundamentally disinterested in playing to cultural tropes and arousing measured aesthetic pleasure in my viewer. Instead, I aim to create images and loose narratives that are strange, surreal and deliberately hard to parse. This creates an interaction with the viewer. They must provide meaning themselves. The joyous cacophony of color and poetry I lay down on a page is a dialogue with my anonymous reader, with whom I hope to connect on a deep and almost spiritual level. Here, at Baltimore’s very own American Visionary Museum, I discover my connection to folk, “outsider” art and art brüt.

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JULY

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Summer was my time of catalytic research through travel. I was highly influenced by the visual works of: Mark Beyer John Porcellino Solange Knopf Anna Haifisch Daria Tessler David Jien Brian Blomerth Tara Booth Ted Parker Luyi Wang Chyrum Lambert Richard Diebenkornâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s abstractions on paper Robert Beatty George Wylesol Clay Hickson Austin English Jason Murphy Aidan Koch Bob Zoell Victor Moscoso Gary Taxali (This does not include my mounting obsession with Patti Smith and the countless musical connections that flowed into my life.)

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Summer 2017’s road trip from Baltimore to Salt Lake City and back set into motion countless fresh endeavors. Every day on the road would follow the same formula of events, only to produce strikingly disparate experiences: key in the next address, double check the state was correct, hope that all the suitcases were haphazardly piled into the backseat, and off we’d cruise through yet another weather system and 25mph byway. The sheer freedom of it was astonishingly easy and casual. With each passing day I became all the more rooted in myself as the landscape shifted in the rearview. My individualism, thoughts, and being was the only constant of the journey. Artistically I treated the trip as a pilgrimage, and each of my stops was validation that kindred spirits existed. Box Brown was one of my two first-year guest critics at MICA who encouraged me to pursue comics. I visited his Kilgore Books & Comics brick & mortar in Denver, CO, collecting a John Porcellino DVD and inquiring about the store’s consignment rules.

Beyond Baltimore, Alice and Martin Provensen’s children book exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NB allowed me to study their original artwork. Their shape-based illustrations were designed in humanistic, cozy palettes, and whimsical linework overlayed their gouache textures on the page. It was a lesson in design and storytelling (not to mention collaboration!) Georgia O’Keefe’s museum in Sante Fe, NM introduced me to some of her lesser known ink wash illustrations of university campuses and architecture. In Austin, TX, I made an appointment with librarian Sam Trevino at the very first zine library I knew of, and it didn’t disappoint. A thousand-odd zines were neatly shelved in someone’s home, and complete with a feline lounging on the desk, I spoke at length with Mr. Trevino about the collection and the DIY revolution. Most of the works were donated by Austin locals. Their subjects ranged from personal diary entries to homeopathic recipes and political rants. I was fortunate enough to donate my zine, “Le Extraño” to their collection.

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I didn’t know it at the time, but my roadtrip would directly inform one of my thesis zines entitled, “No Mames Guey” (or “no kidding” in Spanish). Each experience would be immortalized through a filter of prosepoetry, and letter by letter stamped out of my 1940’s Corona typewriter replete with dusty ribbon. No Mames Guey turned out to be one of my most experimental pieces, integrating photo collage from my trip, text and colorpencil drawings on terraslate paper. It was a wild and woolly, a painterly expression of how I feel when I travel. This zine closely eclipses poetry chap books and I hope to pursue this route in the future.

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AUGUST

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ZINE TIME

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I always start with lists. Here are transcribed list-notes directly from my sketchbooks as my zine planning began: Zine 1: Crowd scenes, in flux, lots of figures, hedonistic action. Zoom into strange limbs, faceless, Sun Club + Straw Hats. Cosmic, like a thousand friendly aliens landing at once. Music flows out. Thrashing about. Changing bodies. Crushed plane. People’s heads are balloons, swap, standing there opening their bodies, ushering people and cosmos and aliens through. - Start with collage, background and print element - Stickers, physical objects that signify that shape - Add gesso, paint, texture - Draw detailed and gradient/patterned things - Cut out negative shapes, be sure to block out solid colors Zine 2: Intense colors, thinning forms, bending perception, heightened sensuality, fluid lines, graphic shapes. Doomed romantics. My dog’s name is coquelicot (Ken Scott’s cotton velvet), take me to your planet. Zine 3: Maybe I’ll do an all-tiger-rug zine? Text: norwegian wood, sit in my tub, fertile earth, potion. Study: Tibetan furniture and stylization of anthropomorphic figures. Zine 4: ??? Fun & a little rebellious. Being “in the know” goes with the psychadelic art / typographic illegible approach. Finding your tribe.

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SEPTEMBER

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Have you read Rumi? I flipped to a fresh and random page, being careful not to crack the spine of my new copy of “Essential Rumi”. As if I divined it, page 34-35 revealed “Where Everything Is Music”. I had just thumbnailed my zine about going to a Sun Club gig (their farewell concert!) and losing myself to the ecstasy of music in the presence of strangers. And then I found this poem. The parallels were so uncanny that I immediately copied the poem down into my sketchbook then called my Mom about the coincidence. Read this magic for yourself: Don’t worry about saving these songs! And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn’t matter. We have fallen into the place where everything is music. The strumming and the flute notes rise into the atmosphere, and even if the whole world’s harp should burn up, there will still be hidden instruments playing. So the candle flickers and goes out. We have a piece of flint, and a spark. The singing art is sea foam. The graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor. Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out.

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A plush banana with embroidered face. Nothing terribly deep. Just a dose of potassium and fun. The inner fabrication was sourced from a 22in-waist terrycloth vintage skirt from Hampden.

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Prismacolor pencils used for the “Where Everything is Music” zine: 30% Warm Grey Cloud Blue Non-Photo Blue Light Aqua Golden Rod Scarlet Lake Black Tuscan Red Canary Yellow + 6B Graphitone

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OCTOBER

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An 8-page, 1-day zine created out of my reverence for Rodin’s odd figural sculptures that seem to drip and dream in white marble. I juxtaposed pop culture references that create visual and verbal puns on the page. I call it, “Rodin du jour”.

This year I am: androgynous babe rainbow clear faced squint eyed hippy in a shearling sherpa denim fool’s gold. Deeper breaths. Steady but roaming. Of course the impetus for this is Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”. I just got to the Chelsea Hotel part. What began as a soft and elegant dream quickly bared its gritty teeth & I became sick reading about the entwinement of Patti & Robert’s young lives — so marked by hunger but unfalteringly chock full of creation, searching, love and the city. I’m glad that Patti describes her disillusionment with the materials and path of art sometimes. What if I did walk away? From all of my things? Does hobo stand for homeward bound? System of movement. Detatchment from physical structures. Trance & Dance (sounds like transcendance). Odd mysteries. Bashful, red feet. Tenderness, giant tenderness. Lore. Infinite in everything. Talismans. The holy cat approaches, linger not. Trading turtle. Rainbow riders. Vibrant, vibration. Nowhere fast. Now/here.

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Inktober 10-step K Beauty routine starring Skeptical Tiger during Lunar New Year. Testing out ink wash shapes & grounds, then going in with black color pencil & white gel pen. Technique inspired by E. Haidle. 77

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NOVEMBER

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The â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cloud Houseâ&#x20AC;? zine was conceived of and completed using a method similar to creating screenprint positives. All linework and text was drawn on different sheets of thin (read: crappy) white paper using black color pencil. The results were scanned and digitally colorized, multiplying the layers to produce tertiary colors when visually mixed/overlapped. This was a new way of working for me. It was intended at first for Risograph file preparation until I discovered that risograph ink is soy-based and can create allergic reactions for users who come in physical contact with it (the ink never fully dries)! Content-wise, the poetry came first. It describes a psychadelic experience I enjoyed one summer in the back woods of Wisconsin. Surrealist, contorted images combine with patterns and scale-play to create the wild yet elegant narrative. One of the images was chosen for the American Illustration 37 archive in April, 2018.

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November also ushered in Illustration Week in NYC. Nathan Huang of the NYTimes, Ray Jones, Esther K. Smith and Dikko Faust of Purgatory Pie Press were mentors-for-an-hour. What a treat. I visited Comic Arts Brooklyn and met Austin English in person for the first time (+countless others including Kevin Czap of Leylines whom I will be contributing to as an artist in 2019). 91

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DECEMBER

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Three of my six slated zines were completed by the end of the Fall semester (two more than originally proposed). Moving forward into Spring, I was saving the Sun Club concert zine, “Where Everything Is Music” to be completed last. Was it because I was summoning my powers to pour it all into my finale? Was I treating all the others as experiments and exercises, for it to culminate in this last fun zine? Was I too afraid to finish what I started? Because “Where Everything Is Music” was started back in August 2017. I sat down after staring at work by David Jien, armed to the gums with my sharpened color pencils, and drew ONE spread. Unsketched, unplanned, and with full determination that every choice I made one paper was both measured and organic. It was one artwork that sat near the middle of my narrative. This one piece I created for the zine was accepted by the Society of Illustrators into their NYC exhibition (Uncomissioned category) and 60th Annual. With a $24 black frame from Michael’s, two custom-engineered cardboard crush-proof systems in place and a roll of bubble wrap, my original work was shipped to NYC in an old IKEA box. It has since been returned to me and I may never unwrap it.

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JANUARY

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My next act come January was “No Mames Guey”, my roadtrip zine. About six months had passed since the Balto > SLC > Balto trek in my Mazda CX-5 and this gap of time was suffice to usher me onto the highway of creation. Freewriting prose vignettes of standout memories and filtering through blurry iPhone photos from the trip kicked it off. I had collected receipts and countless sheafs of daily newspapers, nickel ad sheets from gas stations, even museum exhibition pamphlets. A Best Western knob hanger. Polaroids and concert ticket stubs (AAR I <3 U). A napkin or pastry-box sticker here and there. These provided the fodder for my poetry/imagery sequential collage (if you will), that experimented with visual pacing and collective noise that eventually combines to create a whole. I printed the results on pink, yellow and grey construction paper. It was my ode to the Beatniks. It was my ode to a photobook. I traveled with two friends on the roadtrip. One from my sweet, childhood past and one whom I hadn’t met until we picked her up from the Denver airport, wigs and faux gafas in tow. P.S. David Hockney, your drawings are bomb. P.P.S. I have a new-found love of Pulparindo tamarind rolls.

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FEBRUARY

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A note on Radio WICV (MICA’s internet radio broadcast and programming club). Last semester in my studio elective, Mind. Body. Draw., I had the unique opportunity to co-mingle with some of the most kindred spirits I have ever encountered under one roof. Someone from the class eventually asked me if I knew sign language. The way I held my body and motioned as I spoke indicated as such. Somehow, the conversation led to performance and radio was mentioned. Immediately and from small, soft, hidden bone in my body, I knew I wanted “my own radio show”! The logistics and content were unknown. It didn’t matter. I had to broadcast! And so began my foray into performance — reading poetry (etc.) aloud in a room, secluded and delighted to be just so. www.radiowicv.com www.soundcloud.com/becausethenight/

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John Hendrix taught me the practice of keeping a running list of things that you enjoy drawing and a list of things you (at all costs) block from spouting angrily from your mark-making tool. This exercise led me to understand that I love drawing bugs on rugs. Specifically, woolly little caterpillars and geometric tapestry rugs of questionable traditions. I had a stack of coloraid paper lying around. They were rummaged from a free-bin art upcycle shop in Alexandria, VA. Smelling strongly of paint and very toothy, each color field was an opportunity to see how my Prismacolor pencils would react using their own waxy-creamy chemistry. To inject a pop of white, I used a Pilot gel ink pen as an outline and for colorfill. The more I researched woollybear caterpillars, the more I grew to appreciate the bittersweet romance of nature and my distinct, albeit coincidental, connection to it all.

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MARCH

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My final and sixth zine, “Where Everything Is Music” included an encoded excerpt of Rumi’s poem of the same name as well as a cipher in the form of a snake-adorned bookmark. I had an absolute riot making this zine! Printed on white construction paper in full color, this is the wordless narrative I’ve been dreaming of making. There could be a stronger narrative flow, more consistency and nuanced pacing. But the feeling of going to a concert and succumbing to the ecstacy of music was conveyed through color, form and mark-making alone! Ba-da-boom. If you’ve been keeping track, my zines in chronological order were: Sudden Death Cloud House Rodin Du Jour No Mames Guey Woolies Where Everything Is Music

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Thesis sweats are real. Spring Break is a fantasy. Pure panic and deep chill can run like an alternating current through your many vessels, both awake and asleep. Ginger Jar and Sage Brush were my wall paint colors for my Leidy Gallery (131 W. North Ave) exhibition space. They bisected the wall at a lowered horizon line, about the height eye-level would be at when seated on the ground. I used furniture collected from my home and friends’ houses. Ikea curtains that I spangled with stars, water caltrops, pearl rice, a metal drum, kakui nut necklaces, babo slippers and a fiddle-leaf fig. The exhibition design was meant to invite the viewer to stop, gather at the center with friends and strangers alike, and spend some time with my zines. A meditative space that was far from neutral. Cozy. Transcendental. Nowhere... NOWHERE: Zines by Diana H. Chu @hoitay #nowslashhere #micagradshow2018 Nowhere? Or, Now here? The difference is subtle: a tiny gap, a shift in perspective. This suite of 6 personal narrative zines are visual experiments in color and poetry on the printed page. Each describes a vignette of the artist’s life — from road trip to psychedelic daze — or represents a transcendental philosophy and mood. Using a cut-and-paste aesthetic and analog media, the zines explore the bittersweet romance of nature, the transformative energy of music, and the dionysian ecstasy of life. They invite you to seek mysticism in your current reality, as you encounter every moment mindfully now, here.

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APRIL

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When good things find you, they find you in waves. “Sudden Death” was awarded a gold medal at the MoCCA Arts Festival 2018 for excellence in the Special Format category, NYC April 7th & 8th. It was the first zine I made in Thesis year. Single-color on grey construction paper. The first time I illustrated my own poetry. Apparently, the judges liked the tiny silk tassel I pierced each zine with in the corner. It was important to me that all zines I made this year were of a consistent size — half 8.5” x 11” — which is good for display on shelves, but more importantly, economical to produce. The choice to use construction paper of all colors was simple: it connects my zines with its own cut-and-paste history as well as the craft movement normally associated with the substrate. It’s lowbrow and low-fi. I love how it yellows or fades with time, just as a leaf yellows as it marks a new season.

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My Thesis Gallery talk was in the company of my cohort + Kim Hall + my dear friend Taylor, as well as critics Whitney Sherman, Gizem Vural and Marcellus Hall. My takeaways: - Explore animation. How does your imagery fit with music, on a stage, accompanying a live band? - Performance in relation to my radio WICV burgeonings. Are poetry readings or zine performances in my future? How can the audience interact with my paper ephemera in a way that brings my voice forward? - Color work in a limited palette is stronger than monochromatic. - Look at how other artists extend their personal work into the editorial realm without stylistic compromise. I have laid out a plan for my future in zine making, distributing and sharing. It includes moving to Milwaukee, WI (about a 14hr drive that way) and working as a Graphic Designer at the Milwaukee Art Museum beginning June 1st. Continue distributing with Austin English of Domino Books, all the while hunting for possible commission spots across the galaxy. Send as many zines as possible to residencies, roadshows and libraries. I was accepted into the ICON Illustration Conference 10 Roadshow (Detroit) this July and will be exhibiting there! Thanks to MICA and ICON for their Young Professional Scholarship opportunity. I mayhaps even begin a Milwaukee zine library! Dear reader and future-self: if you’ve gotten this far, I applaud and thank you. Give me a call and see where I’m at. Let’s unfold the future together: 314-852-9392. Thanks for reading.

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This has been a revolutionary year, one that was defined by heightened clarity and focus. I owe my success and sanity to our program Director, Whitney Sherman, for her constant support and wisdom. Each of our weekly meetings was like a trust-fall exercise. Thank you for caring so much about our community and individual progress. A special and dear thanks to Kimberly Hall, I look up to you every day. #cloggoals Thank you, both. Shout out to my Mind. Body. Draw. class and to Michelle La Perriere who has taught me how to love, holistically and kindly, once more. And to my friends both near and far, my parents, Ben and Yukon; the debt is all mine. “Nowhere” Thesis Book by Diana H. Chu © Diana H. Chu 2018 www.dianahchu.com El Sicko Poet. Shaman. Cowboy. Since 1990 Maryland Institute College of Art, MFA Illustration Practice Baltimore, MD Printed in USA

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