Footprints in Sand
Ever since I can remember, I loved art. I used to make up imaginative stories about the lives of the farmers portrayed in a small faded print my mother had hung in our house. It was Millet’s The Gleaners. I remembered being captivated by this masterpiece, used to lie on the floor and stare at it for hours. Connection wasn’t too hard since my mother’s family were all farmers from Miyako Island, one of many in the Okinawan chain.

I was introduced to art early through the Japanese education system (K to 4). Even then, I gravitated towards sculpture, predictably making clay monsters and wooden robots. By the time our family immigrated to the U.S. in 1970, I was familiar with various mediums and their basic techniques.

But it was the martial art craze of the 70’s that snared me and defined my career path. Staying focused, I tried to repress my “sculpting itch” but like a cork in water my restless soul kept popping up. The more I tried to force it down, the stronger it would explode above the surface. In high school, I made props for a graduation ceremony and designed and constructed a winning Homecoming parade float. During college, my incessant doodle pen-sketches screamed out my original thoughts.

In 1991, I finally finished my degree in Kinesiology at UCLA. As a graduation present I bought myself a bench-top scroll saw. With it, I made wooden cutouts and simple sculptures. I soon moved to Okinawa, where I traced my ancestral roots and reconciled my childhood traumas. While there, I studied Okinawan karate, Japanese calligraphy and chip carving.

Getting back stateside in 1996, I settled in Atlanta, GA and opened a karate school. I was also appointed to my current position, the Director of Technical Committee of AAKF-South Atlantic Region.

As a hobby, I made a few wooden sculptures, but in the summer of 2002 something finally exploded within me. It felt like a cosmic order—create or die! So I took a deep breath and jumped. I enrolled in the Welding Technology Program at Gwinnett Technical College and began making metal sculptures.

The Order to the Madness
Seeds of inspirations are constantly germinating in my psyche. As one sprouts I like to sculpt it in my mind before making a few preliminary sketches or clay models. Sometime I skip this process altogether. Visualization is dynamic and often vague, leaving me in a mixed state of excitement and anxiety. The piece will finally materialize in the shop, after struggling with multitudes of adjustments in texture, composition and angles. It usually flows well, but the real challenge is trying to manage all the seeds at different stages, not to mention the limitation of space-time continuum.

I like my work to be abstract, interpretive and figurative, adhering to compositional form I learned in Japanese calligraphy, and influenced by past masters like Musashi (17th century Japanese swordsman/artist), Michelangelo, and Julio Gonzalez. A moment's inspiration might come from a variation in my student's karate movement or in my own examination of intricate detail in the skeletal remains of a coyote's skull, but my aim is to inspire an interaction between the sculpture and viewer, who can freely interpret and explore its evocations.

I believe in the muses. Mine are never subtle, they perpetually scream in my head.. I can always count on troubling fellowship from at least three, rarely fewer. My only solitude is in training and teaching karate, which keeps me in sanity.

Themes and Questions
In my figurative piece, Trepidation, I wanted to symbolize the emotional turmoil of being caught between your own desires and others’ expectations. Do you listen to your inner voice or follow what others tell you? The figure’s wings represent our deep seeded need to express our true nature. The figure’s precarious stance leads the viewer to interpret whether it’s falling or lifting off. The facial expression can be seen as tense in defiance, or fearful in confusion. The rectangular base is boxed in sharp, hard angles representing the structure and limitations we create in our lives. Does the sculpture (do you) desire to live inside or outside the box?

The Two-Faced series exemplifies combined concept and sketch-form techniques.. I created spontaneous sculptures based on an idea that people’s outward appearance is often a façade for their inner-selves. How do we “face” the world—with our true selves or with our mask? The answer of course is different for each one of us, and it is often complex.

Working with wood presents an entirely different challenge. Each cut you make on a piece of wood is akin to Japanese calligraphy where you get one chance. To perpetuate the “alive” quality of the wood, the grain structure and texture must play a major role in the final composition and form. Because wood must be “rested” at various times during the sculpting process, especially during the sanding and finishing phases, considerable time is spent on each project.