Tarantula's Featured Artist of November
The juxtaposing world of Daisuke Takeya
“I am an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is comprised of the exploration of nature and plausibility in contemporary society, and hinges on all kinds of double meanings. The duality of my approach is reflected by my life spent in Asia and North America, in juxtaposing and intermingling milieu of disparate and diverse cultural contexts such as critical social and environmental issues, Japanese heritage and pop, Renaissance/Baroque painting methods and ideologies.
Combining fields of painting, performance art, sculpture, photography, installation and curatorial praxis, my work emphasizes process in terms of creativity, production and collaboration, and attempts to approach an understanding of context and environment. Its primary characteristic is that I see production as a process of putting myself in a particular place, and then understanding it.”
Daisuke Takeya
When Daisuke was a student at the New York Academy of Art in New York City in the early 90’s, Tarantula’s founder and author Maja Milanovic was studying writing at the New School For Social Research. They met in the clubs of the Lower East Side when Daisuke approached Maja and her friend to ask if he could paint their portraits together on a big canvas. What followed were a few sessions in the then dangerous part of the city, Williamsburg, where Daisuke cooked Japanese food for his models that dutifully sat in his studio dressed in lace while listening to gothic music in the background. They continued to meet and dance and explore the club scene together as the paint on the canvas became thicker and denser. Due to the friend’s departure to a college out of town, the painting was never finished. What started instead that New York summer was a writer artist friendship that continued with Maja first writing one of Daisuke’s thesis works on mathematics, art and metaphysics. Maja’s mother’s apartment served as storage for some of Daisuke’s large realistic nude paintings. When he received his MFA, he decided to move to Canada to pursue his passion for art, but the collaboration continued with Maja writing an essay On a Journey With A Curious Mind about the artist’s diptych paintings Everybody Loves You, landscape paintings Kara and portraits of children and clay work Eyes of a Child.
Today, the two find each other on two very different parts of the world, Japan and Sweden. It has been many years since they last met. However, with the genesis of Tarantula just a few months ago, it was obvious that their writer artist collaboration must continue from where it was last left off.
An interdisciplinary artist whose curiosity leads him to the center of situations and events, sometimes even trouble, Tarantula meets Daisuke on yet a new journey - exploring the world that directly affects him through performance art. Fasten your seatbelts, dear readers, it might be a wild ride!
Subscribe to receive for the next four weeks Daisuke Takeya’s art performance videos “Solitude Standing” that he shot during the quarantine in Toronto that follow his struggles under the pandemic.