Returning Home
The story behind Jeffrey Yang and Kazumi Tanaka’s collaboration “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home,” a series of poems and drawings in our Summer 2017 issue.
Kazumi Tanaka, Girl, 2007, oolong on paper, 10″ x 10″.
Kazumi Tanaka works with wood, bone, sound, and her own hair. She works with plaster, glass, paint, and light. She’s remade the furniture of her mother’s only “tiny corner of … comfort space” in miniature—every drawer and door perfectly functional, with the use of tweezers. She’s made a bird’s nest out of hundreds of stainless-steel pins. She has indigo-dyed silk fabric using a traditional shibori-zome technique, stitching the fabric with cotton thread and intertwining it with rope before arranging it, at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, into a rippling umbilical form on a low, square altar draped with white linen.
As a gift for a friend, Kazumi made a tiny oval “Box of Wisdom” out of cherrywood and copper nails, in which she placed utensils sculpted out of her wisdom teeth, on a pillow
