Artist makes real his visions of dragons
By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer
Shows '2000 Dragons' Today through Jan. 31 Academy Art Center at Linekona 532-8741 Mark Kadota and Don Ed Hardy Through Jan. 29 Robyn Buntin Gallery 545-5572
Don Ed Hardy was just 6 years old when the dragons started arriving at his house.
"Pluto" by Don Ed Hardy, acrylic on synthetic archival paper
It was the 1950s, and Hardy's father was in Japan, a civilian worker helping with the post-war American occupation. More than the actual items his father sent home to California — reversible jackets, teapots and other gifts — it was the intricately drawn designs (dragons!) imprinted on them that caught Hardy's eye and triggered his imagination.
Starting today, the largest but certainly not the last product of Hardy's lifelong fascination with the slithery, mysterious creatures will be on display at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
"2000 Dragons" — a 2000-square-foot (4 feet high, 500 feet long) scroll painting — is Hardy's celebration of dragons from the Asian tradition. He created the piece in conjunction with the year 2000, a dragon year in the Chinese astrological calendar. He started on New Year's Day that year and didn't stop until he had finished the piece seven months later.
"I could only see five feet of the canvas at a time," he said. "It rolled like a roll of film. I numbered each of the dragons in kanji (Japanese characters) to keep track."
There are, appropriately, 2000 dragons in the sprawling work, some just an inch long, others unfurling 20 or 30 feet; some are threatening, other almost humorous.
"They're my favorite visual image in the world because they embody the key energy of the universe," he said. "I never get burned out on them because (the image) involves so many cultural styles."
Hardy's work is informed by another childhood fascination: tattoos.
"I had a toy tattoo stand set up in the house when I was 10 years old," he said. "Later, I was very interested in the Asian influence on Western tattoo art."
In fact, in many circles, Hardy is as well known for his masterful tattoo art as he is for his paintings.
In 1973, he spent six months in Japan studying with a traditional tattoo master.
He was the first non-Asian allowed to enter a tattoo culture that, at the time, "was very underground."
Hardy was close friends with American tattoo legend Sailor Jerry Collins — "the Cezanne of modern tattoo," as Hardy described him — who operated a tattoo parlor on Smith Street in downtown Honolulu.
Students and faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, where Hardy earned a BFA in printmaking in 1967, were initially "horrified" at Hardy's interest in tattoos.
"Nobody, except maybe military, was getting tattoos at that time," he said. "It was just a marginalized street art."
Yet, Hardy said, tattoos have been good to him. Though he has lived in Hawai'i for most of the last 18 years, Hardy maintains a studio in San Francisco, where he does occasional commission work.
He says tattoo work has provided him an income that inures him to the "enormous amounts of snobbery and control" exercised by some gallery directors. More importantly, it has also expanded his artistic vision.
"Tattoo encompasses so many different strands of world art — classical Western art, modernism, classical Japanese mythology," he said.
His "2000 Dragons" has been enthusiastically received around the world. Hardy represented the United States at the Cuenca Bienal in Ecuador two years ago.
Hardy said he's especially happy to finally exhibit his art in his adopted home.
"I dreamed about having it here because people here are so much more conversant with Asian imagery," he said.
Hardy also has 20 individual paintings showing at the Robin Buntin Gallery in Honolulu, part of an exhibition with Mark Kadota. That show runs through Jan. 29.
