From the Artist

I have been making prints about my own family and using images of members of my family. I scan the images into the computer and then manipulate them. In this particular print, Mei, which means “eyes," I scanned Chinese cabbage leaves directly (not the photograph, but the actual leaves) for the texture and lines, and then used the images of the eyes of my two daughters at various ages, and my boyfriend’s grandson. The children are all of mixed blood: different races.

“Kimchi”, which is a popular Korean pickle, made of various ingredients: Chinese cabbage, chili peppers, ginger, etc., and then fermented. In a similar way, the children are mixed and fermented, and the process produces new individuals—new ways of looking at life, new options.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}

As a printmaker and painter, my work has always drawn from my observations of nature. I eschewed any outwardly depictive imagery because I was convinced that the abstracted form was more truly “real.” However, when I began to work on the computer, I found that certain depictive images haunted me. My father, who died in 1950, was a documenter. He kept photo albums with pithy statements penciled under the pictures. He was also an amateur photographer, his pictures and the photographs of him chronicle a time in American history—WWII–that I felt was important to the formation of my own identity as a Japanese American. This period was also of extreme importance to my father’s experience of being American. The ability of the computer to combine and resize images inspired me to make a series of works dealing with my family and its history.

The way I work, using both my hand and gesture as well as the technology of the computer, is very much an expression of my interest in duality. We, as humans, are both blessed and cursed by our intelligence; the computer is a revolutionary tool invented and engineered by humans, which provides us with another way of using our faculties of hand, memory, and imagination.
_{—Excerpted from https://www.michi-itami.com/selected-essays, accessed 6-24-2021}