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JUNKO CHODOS is a Japanese-born artist who grew up in Japan during World War II. She survived bombings, fascism, death and destruction, and lived through the rebuilding of Japan after the war. She came to the United States in her late 20s, as a spiritual refugee from Japan, and later naturalized as a US citizen.
She has had solo exhibitions at the Tokyo Central Museum, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis, and the Fresno Art Museum, as well as at many galleries throughout the USA. She has also lectured widely on her art at universities and museums, including at the Getty Museum. In her writing and speaking, she describes her art as a process of truth-seeking and consciousness-raising. She has also worked collaboratively with composers and choreographers, most recently in 2006 when she created a series of forty giant mylar panels to serve as backdrops for a dance program which ran for seven nights at the North Park Theater in San Diego.
She calls her art, "Centripetal Art" and defines it as art which seeks the inner center in order to encounter divine presence there. In her process of creating art, which is a mystical process, she dives into the deepest personal abyss to the depths where the most personal thing becomes the most universal.
In order to reach your own center, you have to have both inner and outer freedom: freedom to be yourself, to be socially awakened, and to be honest. This requires the artist to fight against severe challenges and transcend them. These are her perilous battles.
Junko believes that only when the artist goes through these perilous battles successfully then, by encountering the art, the viewer gains the opportunity to follow his or her own journey towards transcendence.
This new kind of art was born out of her life-long spiritual journey. The enormous body of work which she has created is the trace on paper of this journey.
Junko was a child of four years old during the
allied bombings of Japan. Whenever the carpet bombers came overhead,
all the windows had to be closed and the lights had to be turned out,
and Junko and her sisters would huddle in the dark. Often at those
times, their mother would put a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
on the old phonograph which had a bamboo needle (metal was scarce and
only the Japanese army could use it in those days). She told Junko and
her sisters, "I want you to hear the most sublime music that has ever
been composed before you end your short lives." Junko remembers
listening to the Ode to Joy against the sounds of the bombs exploding
outside. When the war was over, she wanted to create art that would be
sublime and redemptive in the same way - and this book shows how
convincingly she has succeeded.
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