ARTIST STATEMENT
A giant beast woken from slumber… Part Godzilla and part elephant, a mutant spliced from the genetic code of two national icons and brought to life in an artist’s laboratory…
Chazilla and their ragtag crew of nuclear children, skeleton spiders and skullheads are Shin Koyama’s creations. They’ve grown in number over the years, born of Koyama’s personal experiences of living in Arita, Japan and Chiang Mai, Thailand, and navigating two distinct cultures.
Koyama’s art carries boundless imagination and historical memory— cast in the shadow of the atomic bombing of Japan— in its DNA. His speciality as artist-historian: drawing from Japan’s artistic and cultural heritage to express contemporary identity through cross-breed characters— as whimsical and kawaii as they are erotic and grotesque— depicted across a medley of mediums, spanning Arita porcelain, printmaking and acrylic painting.
Shaped by the character and contradictions of the modern era, each piece is embedded with a splinter of the zeitgeist; of technological advancement and a bottomless capacity for violence and destruction; plurality and popular media; and the clasped hands of dread and optimism for the fate of humanity.
