Thad Higa is a Korean-Okinawan American language worker, born on Ohlone Land, California, raised in Hawaiʻi, and currently based in San Francisco. Working across mediums that span writing, graphic design, artists’ books, Risograph, letterpress, typewriter, silkscreen, wheatpaste collaging/decollage, framing, woodworking, living rooms, and large scale mural installations, Thad’s works are unified through the material of paper, the presence of multiples, and an often textural and noisy aesthetic. His creations are iterative, open-ended, unfinished works that rely on changing cultural, political, and economic positions for their existence.
Thad states; “In a larger sense, I try to create work in recognition of language building, of communicating ideas to be understood, even if the message is that not all things can be understood, not all things can be captured, diminished, reduced. Nonetheless, it is an attempt of connection and meaning making, art against the hierarchy of western meaning making in art and language vs. all others, art against nihilism, art for something and as something to stand on; which is to say art against art for arts’ sake, art not for the individuals’ sake, but for the message, in recognition of connections and awareness of our connectivity, art against the void of the self and end product of the self-interested, art against the anti-sublimation of art for capital’s sake, which is to say art against design, art for money and status in an evil, anti-earth, misanthropic system, art for liberation from imperialism, colonization and its stewards, art for release into the unknown which is the great change, the feeling of being alive and figuring it out, art making connections in the darkness. Art in recognition of the muscle imagination, in counteraction to the deadening blows of propaganda and mass media in service of capital, art as a deprogrammer. Art rooted in memory.”
Thad also works with the material of questions, for example; “What factors go into control and who is behind the buttons? How do people turn away from another’s suffering? How to both affect and disaffect a people, individually and en masse? How to teach an individualist driven society about connectivity and historicity? How to be able to embody in artwork the power of metaphor, to transfer the beauty of the combination of colours or forms into the beauty of two different people or cultures in dialogue? How to enrage and uplift at once?”
Currently, Thad’s output is focused on the processes of value-making and legibility in the context of mass media propaganda, advertising, and social interfacing especially on the Internet. This includes the commodification and politicising of identity, the systemic, binary failures in the digital-social ecosystem built towards profit through division, and the connecting through-lines of language between them. Thad comments; “The interpenetration of these subjects in my work often leads to nihilistic sloganeering, caustic, alt-right rhetoric and ideologies, confrontations with white-supremacy, conspiracy and cult thinking, and other fuelled cultures that engender parallel cul-de-sacs of thought.”
Thad has chosen the medium of book arts to materialise his present focus as; “The kinetic book form can explicate the lasting physical impacts of an ephemeral, electronic reality. Furthermore, the various craft disciplines of the book acts as a metaphor for the multidimensional, contradictory nature of complex subjects. Artists’ books can harbour simultaneous narrations through haptic, verbivocovisual, and proprioceptive language, while maintaining the accessible ubiquity of the common book form. This is a crucial counter to binary, linear narratives and logic that lead to superficial thinking.” By engaging readers on multiple levels about difficult subject matters, Thad hopes to discover the ways in which we read and do not read, how content and forms shape division, and how we propagate systems of control through unthinking, uncritical language.
To conclude, in the words of Thad, his art practice is a “daily attempt to stay sane and engaged in the insane world”.
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