East Hampton--Pritam & Eames celebrates the furniture art of Wendy Maruyama and Kristina Madsen in an exhibit that opens on August 9 and runs through September 17. Both Maruyama and Madsen draw from the other side of the world in this current body of work, observes Bebe Johnson, partner in the East Hampton gallery. “It is Japan in Maruyama’s case, and Fiji in Madsen’s.” Although their work is a study in contrast as far as style, material, and focus, they share a background of rigorous training in furniture making and status as among the most prominent figures in the American studio furniture movement. Maruyama and Madsen have been friends since the early ‘80s when they exhibited at ArtPark in Lewiston, NY.

Wendy Maruyama is a professor in the Furniture Design program at San Diego State University, CA. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad and is included in the permanent collection of the American Craft Museum, NY; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Oakland Museum of Art, CA; and the University Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Maruyama’s new and provocative Turning Japanese cabinet series juxtapose icons of Japanese pop culture like motorcycles, “Hello Kitty” paraphernalia, and hentai (a Japanese slang word meaning perverted) comic books with more traditional elements of Japanese aesthetics. She acknowledges that her Turning Japanese case pieces stand in stark contrast to the Tokonoma alcove in traditional Japanese homes that houses scrolls, flower arrangements, and other art. “My new cabinets are about the myths and contradictions I discovered when I began visiting Japan in the ‘90s,” she relates. “I began to question Western assumptions of Japan as a land of temples, gardens, Buddhas, koi, and geishas. I could see vivid contradictions in the pachinko parlors, in the continuous haze of cigarette smoke, overwhelming cities, and its blatant obsession with sexuality.”

In the two floor standing cabinets, "King of the Monsters” and “Angry Asian Women”, Maruyama says the design began with the case and refers to her earliest childhood memory relating to her family heritage -- the traditional geisha doll cases. “I used to make up stories about why the doll was in the case and I began imagining the case as a diorama. Later, I enlarged the idea which is how the cases evolved into these cabinets.”

The “King of the Monsters” cabinet, with its elegantly proportioned case, supports a glass top with a diorama featuring a Godzilla figurine stomping through a Japanese city with a laser cut image of Mount Fuji in the background. "When my father took my sister and me to see all the Godzilla movies at the Big Sky Drive-In in the mid-'50s in southern California, he said we came from that country where all of the people had black hair like ours and almond eyes. As bad as those movies were, I came to love that damned lizard and its connection to Japan. Eventually, my Dad upgraded us to samurai movies with Toshiro Mifune and, even though I knew all of the kimonos and the decapitations were just part of the movies, those films too became a window to the floating world, and the land our grandparents had left."

Maruyama’s “Angry Asian Women” cabinet, painted with a brilliant red lacquer, also has a glass top, but this diorama presents two Devilman Ladies from the comic series standing in front of an image of an ancient Japanese temple, its overgrown stone steps descending towards the figures. The sky is threatening. The doors have two laser-burned tansu-like plates of a geisha with her hand inside her kimono, an image taken from a 17th century ukioye print. “I saw this woman as sure of herself, assertive, and a dangerous character. I love the depiction of women through these modern idioms. It’s a complete contrast to the geisha dolls in the cases from my childhood.” In addition to the floor standing cabinets, Maruyama has seven bamboo wall hung cabinets, including “Chicky Chicky Boom Boom” that uses a Harley Davidson motorcycle mirror for the cabinet’s pull.

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