I am thrilled that I waited until today, October 30th to visit The Colloquium through the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. I was privileged enough to see the artist Kip Fulbeck present his journey through life, all the way into the present day. He is actually a professor at our school, where he has received the distinguished teaching award, as well as had many of his students help him with his work Perseverance, which I will talk more in depth about later.
He first began with a small video that he had compiled called Sex, Love & Kungfu where he took videos and pieced them all together to create a montage of different karate movies, along with his commentary in the background. Then, he began a slide show of important people in his life, as well as a somewhat random array of pictures he liked or had a funny backstory to. He mentioned his college friends quite a lot, and loved to talk about how one of them is two years younger than him, yet looks more like fifteen years older than him! He shared a lot of different doodles he had done during faculty meetings, which be said was “the most dreadful experiences he ever has to go through”. He then began to talk about his mom, and how she didn’t know how to put gas in her car until he taught her (he showed a group of around five pictures showing her pumping gas for the first time, all with a very disgusted face). His mom and dad had a marriage that was illegal, because his dad is white and his mom is asian. He has never liked how multiracial people had to decide/pick who they represent on government forms, because he could only pick one or the other and not both.
This is when he began to bring up The Hapa Project, where he took pictures of multiethnic people and asked them to write a phrase about themselves. He spoke briefly about this, and then moved onto his latest piece of work named Perseverance. This was an installation about the art of Japanese tattooing, and how they incorporate tradition, mythology, folklore and religion into their large tattoo pieces that span from the shoulders all the way down to the rear end. He explained the process for how he asked all of these very famous japanese tattoo artists to come to the United States and pose for pictures for him, so he could show off their artwork. But in Japan, they are illegal, and getting one of these beautifully crafted pieces of art is pretty difficult. But Kip Fulbeck had one, all done by hand (without a tattoo gun). He spoke about the importance and care that these artists put into their work, and how it took his artist around an hour and a half just to place his work on him, because he kept drawing it on, then stepping back, looking at it for five minutes, then taking it off and adjusting it until it had utterly perfect placement.
I have a few tattoos myself, and I have always wondered why people go to cheap tattoo parlors and get a pretty meaningless tattoo that isn’t executed right and was obviously not thought out or thorough. This piece of artwork is going to be on your body forever, and I believe it is important to think about the design you want for a long time and it is equally important to find a tattoo artist that has the skill and the attention to detail to give you a breathtaking piece of work. I searched for a long time before I found a tattoo parlor and tattoo artist that I loved, and I am so happy I have stuck with her ever since. I am actually getting my 5th tattoo by her next week, and am driving four hours down to San Diego just for it. So in this way, I believe I share Kip and the Japanese artists view on the importance of detail, planning, and execution of a tattoo because it is after all, a piece of art.
This is a piece from his show Perseverance
Kip Fulbeck is an amazing artist, overachiever, guitar player and surfer. For more on his work, click here
