Modern Meditation Meets Pop Art in Paintings

Inspired by the thangka tradition, theology, and the occult, New York artist Mr. Kiji paints spiritual symbols.

November 4, 2015, 9:25pm

Sugar Coated Bullets. All images courtesy the artist

From spherical globes to naval ships, Mr. Kiji’s paintings on canvas for a new exhibit titled Me We Now Everybody contain colorful abstract shapes in pleasing compositions. The forms are symbols that are at once universal and archetypal, lending a certain spiritual parlance to Pop art.

Me We Now Everybody looks to spin usually obscure historic, religious, or cultural meaning. Mr. Kiji tells The Creators Project, "A recurring theme in my work especially in this show deals with conflicting narratives in Eastern vs. Western Culture that effect the frames in which we view the world around us."

Trained in industrial design from The Rhode Island School of Design, Kiji’s most iconic works come in the form of large-scale murals to digital art works for online publications. He gets commissioned for large commercial projects for Converse, MTV, Nike, Toyota, and Microsoft, but looks to painting to work out deeper themes on a personal and semiotic level.

Same Above as Below

At the age of 17, Kiji spent a year learning the Tibetan Buddhist painting style of thangka by living in a Tibetan monastery. His works always come back to the thangka tendency to develop elaborate symmetrical compositions used as important theological teachings. In Kiji’s works, the titles play just as an important role as the painting themselves in resonating deeper meaning. They maintain titles like Same Above as Below. He says, "The phrase itself is a maxim of Hermeticism and the Occult. The phrase resonated to me for being quite Eastern although it’s Western in origin. It’s also a nod to my friend Dust La Rock.”

For the show Me We Now Everybody at Three Kings Studio in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, Same Above as Below is presented as a triptych while Me We Now Everybody is made up of 16 separate components on birch ply, while Sugar Coated Bullets comes in two manifestations. Kiji says, "I think I’m slowly becoming less illustrative when it comes to how I approach compositions. This work still has a bunch of formal compositional elements of thangka painting. In the more illustrative diptych, Sugar Coated Bullets, the process was a bit more exploratory and fluid which lead to things evolving as counterpoints to other elements.”

If Me We Now Everybody is a modern meditation, enlightenment just got graphic.