The Fulcrum Press is pleased to present, 85 7 20, a solo exhibition of images by LA-based artist Hiroshi Clark. The exhibition, in conjunction with the release of his new publication with the same title, is a curated selection of images from his family archive. The two work together to examine the relationship between subject, identity and place as well as personal experience with barriers, familial history, and biraciality. 

 “My mother was part of a Japanese exchange student program in 1983 when she met my father in Orange County, California. He was 18 years old. After her return to Japan, my lovesick father sold his Nissan pickup truck and bought a ticket to Japan to court my mother. Once there, he rented a small room in a basement and got a job at a “cowboy bar” in Tokyo.

    Tucked away in a closet, my mother keeps hundreds of negatives. There is little preciousness to her system of organization which consists of putting any and all negatives in a dirty plastic craft bin within a cardboard box containing two point and shoot film cameras. Much of my family’s existing archive is in this box. She was always one step away from tossing it entirely. My mother saves a lot of things and if it were up to my father, this would have been thrown out long ago.

    My mother and I have different first languages. Much gets mistranslated and lost. We once talked about Kokoro. My mother read her old copy from the 70’s while I read the version that was translated to English. We talked about some of the themes. It was much easier to discuss sadness in the work than it was to talk about the ramifications of a rapidly modernizing world. I wanted to talk to her about globalization and capitalism and since I didn’t have the words, we settled on the heartbreak at the center of the story.

    I recently took on the arduous task of digitizing the neglected negatives from the closet. Through this gesture I encountered photos of people I didn’t know existed, as well as moments left out of the photo albums I was already familiar with. Left only with a timestamp of the date in the corner of an image to work with, have I been able to cobble together a semblance of history.” - Hiroshi Clark