“I don’t know any of the people in these paintings, and they don’t know each other,” said the late artist Shingo Honda, who lived almost a decade-and-a-half on the Big Island, about the works he produced between 2000 and 2004 in downtown Los Angeles.
“Parallel,” an exhibition of those creations curated by Andrzej Kramarz, is on view at the East Hawaii Cultural Center from August 7 to September 24.
“I’ve put them in spaces where they’ve never been and where they’ve never been together. Each person lives in their own space, different from mine, different from anyone else’s. They have their own reality and it’s always changing,” Honda said. I don’t know what they’re thinking or what they see, or where they’re going or where they’ve been. Our paths may never cross again, but in this parallel world, there’s something that we share: we’re not strangers.”
The internationally-renowned Honda, who died in 2019, was loosely affiliated with the Mono-Ha art group coming out of Tama Art University in Japan. He came to the Big Island in 2005. According to author and art critic Amaury Saint-Gilles, “Shingo was really on his own quest from the very start. Looking for inspiration, Shingo sought to use his unique style to contemporize the spatial components of more traditional Japanese art going back centuries, the very work art historians are most familiar with.”
For more information, visit EHCC online at ehcc.org, call 961-5711, or visit the gallery at 141 Kalakaua Street. Current hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, and Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.