Director's Cut

You could say that life has come full circle for Maui-born artist Jonathan Yukio Clark.

After spending a little more than a decade away on the mainland and in Japan, the multi-disciplinary artist returned to his island home where he currently serves as gallery director at Schaefer International Gallery at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center.

“It’s a really special place — I grew up with one of the first generation of kids who grew up with MACC,” recalls Clark. “I remember when it was built in 1994, and how it just expanded certainly my thinking when we first visited for field trips in elementary school, and I think it had that effect on Maui.

“It was this sort of coming into being — this very new, state-of-the-art facility with many different facets and with that, the gallery became ... we’re not an art museum technically but we are the closest that Maui has to an art museum of gallery space. I think it’s one of the best playboxes in that it’s so versatile. The way the gallery space was designed, it really can accommodate anything an artist can dream of.”

The spacious 4,000-square-foot gallery is one of the largest museum-quality exhibition spaces in the state of Hawai‘i. Designed from the ground up, it features soaring ceilings, solid wood flooring, climate control, state-of-art lighting and a movable inner wall system.

Clark joined Schaefer in 2019, serving as director for the past two years. His role involves overseeing the exhibits program, including curating about five shows per year. The gallery also hosts its signature triennial Schaefer Portrait Challenge, a statewide juried exhibition that was held earlier this year; and the upcoming MACC Biennial, a juried cross-disciplinary exhibition showcasing new work by Hawai‘i artists July 8 to August 30 this year.

“It really has been an honor to work there and it’s also really enjoyable, never boring and always a challenge from exhibit to exhibit ...,” says Clark. “The gallery’s goal is really to showcase a broad spectrum of artwork and perspectives that speak to human experience both local and international.”

After about a decade away on the mainland and in Japan, Clark returned to his quiet hometown of Pukalani in Upcountry Maui, where his home doubles as his studio workshop.
*(Photo by Adam Jung.)*

Sculpture and prints from Clark’s solo exhibition, *A Room For Modular Landscapes*, at mh PROJECT nyc in New York in 2021.

Clark recalls his love for art starting at a young age. As a kid, he would use rolls of freezer paper and draw dinosaurs, fish and airplanes — creating “the kid’s version of murals.”

“I just kind of ended up going down this path and didn’t really question it and got most serious about painting between junior and senior year of high school (at Seabury Hall),” he says. “Then running into an artist who was based on Maui at that time who offered me private lessons in oil painting and some important training that kind of expanded the foundation that I really needed in terms of drafting skills, color theory and just learning how to register the visual to the mark on the paper or canvas.”

Clark would go on to earn his bachelor’s degree in fine arts, double majoring in painting and East Asian studies, at Washington University in St. Louis; followed by 13 months as a research student in printmaking at Kyoto Seika University; and then his master’s in fine arts in studio art at New York University.

He stayed a few more years in The Big Apple before moving back to his quiet hometown of Pukalani in Upcountry Maui. Nestled in the foothills of Haleakalā, his home doubles as
his studio workshop, working in a variety of art mediums — sculpture, printmaking, painting, textile and drawing.

“A lot of times I’ll start with paper maquettes, and I’ll brainstorm with paper,” shares Clark on his creative process. “My background is in painting, so even when I made the jump to sculpture, I feel like I still think of sculpture as plein air, like I consider myself as kind of a flat sculptor.”

Among the work he’s most proud of is a large panorama wall piece titled “In The Realm of Mount Mihara,” a six-panel monotype print on washi paper featuring the rugged beauty of Izu Oshima, a small volcanic island south of Tokyo. The piece was part of his solo exhibition at the Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery in New York’s Upper East Side in 2022.

“I first visited (Izu Oshima) in 2018, did some hiking at the summit and was really struck by it,” shares Clark. “The volcanic landscape was reminiscent of Haleakalā and Kīlauea, but also very distinct. It was this experience of almost like double or triple vision of seeing a landscape for
the first time and then having this very intense recall of previous landscapes that I experienced.”

The relationship between humanity and nature, particularly mountainscapes and landscapes, often percolates into his artwork, which also is inspired by architectural framework.

“One concept that comes to me a lot is shakkei (the Japanese concept translated as borrowed scenery),” notes Clark. “It’s the integration of the natural world into human built environments. That relationship between interior and exterior can often be very fluid, especially in Hawai‘i and definitely in Japan.”

jyclark.com