A SPACE ODYSSEY

Installation artist Misaki Kawai’s colorful world is filled with walruses, surfers, dollhouses, and just a little bit of porn

By Kate Williams

Misaki Kawai’s apartment building looks like thousands of others in Brooklyn: brick, beige, and vaguely industrial. Inside, though, Kawai’s loft is like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse—paint-splattered, trippy, and full of enough not-quite-imaginary friends to throw a mad tea party at a moment’s notice.

In the entryway, two papier-mâché and painted bikini-clad women, one about eight feet tall, hang on the wall. A walrus sits in Kawai’s studio, and in another corner, a four-foot wave crests, ridden by a tiny surfer with a mop of furry-hair. The walls are covered with paintings, the floor with drips, and handmade instruments hang above the doorway.

When I arrive at Kawai’s on a weekday, she and her boyfriend, photographer Justin Waldron, are both exhausted but excited. Kawai has work I Won’t Grow Up, a group show opening tomorrow at New York’s Cheim and Read Gallery that also includes Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and Louise Bourgeois. They’ve been up all night preparing, and turned her pieces over to the gallery just minutes before I arrive.
“I just finished four hours ago,” Kawai says. “I’ve been sleeping until 3pm, but today, I am going to try and sleep at night and not in the afternoon.” While Kawai’s work may look like delightful child’s play, her work ethic belies the serious artist that she is. She exhibited in 18 shows in 2007, and by summer 2008, has already been in eight shows in New York, Los Angeles, Taipei, and Tokyo.

Originally from Osaka, Japan, Kawai went to art school in Kyoto. “I didn’t want to work for a design company or something like that, so I was just traveling and making stuff,” she says. “I didn’t want to come to New York, because I don’t like big cities, but someone told me to come here if you want to be an artist, and then I felt like I just had to be here. When I came to New York, I saw installations and started to make large stuff, because everyone in Japan has such a tiny apartment!”

This change in scale affected much of Kawai’s work, especially Space House, a multi-floored dollhouse-like dwelling constructed to hang in the air. It’s complete with stairs, working lights, windows, televisions, and an exercise room. She made the Space House’s inhabitants, too, some of whom are naked and lounge around a Jacuzzi—Kawai gave them their skin tone with patches cut from porn magazines. “I was like, ‘Where can I find totally naked pictures?’ I was so nervous! I had to go and look through all kinds of porn!’” she squeals. On other dolls, she’s pasted on pictures of the faces of people she knows. She points to one. “Can you tell it’s me?” I can indeed. The eight-inch Misaki stands in a messy room where the floor is littered with scribbled-on pieces of paper. “That’s my studio!” she says. “Can you tell?”

Before she branched out, Kawai focused almost entirely on making dolls like the ones that currently live in her houses. “I like handmade stuff,” she says. “When I was little, my mom made my clothes and my grandma made me stuff, so I just love anything that is handmade. Of course, I love computers and technology, too, but I like handmade because it has more heart.”

In addition to her sculptures and installations, Kawai is also a prolific painter, though it’s something she’s only started doing in the last couple of years. “I would draw a lot, but I needed more,” she explains. “And then last year, I figured it out, and was like ‘Oh, I can make paintings! I can be a painter!’” The paintings that she’s made since are largely brightly colored and often of people who look like animals and animals that look like people. I ask which is her preferred subject. She thinks for a minute, then says, “People are kind of like animals, so both.” Kawai clearly loves animals, though, especially the furry kind: she rattles off kitties, dogs, pandas, camels, and alpacas as some of her favorites. She grills me about my pet fish, and when I ask if she has any pets, she gets a mischievous twinkle in her eye, and darts to her bookshelves, pulling down a fluffy white, eerily lifelike mechanical cat. Kawai flips a switch, and the cat meows. “I just got her for Christmas,” she says. “I kept saying ‘I want a kitty, I want a kitty, and then my friends got me this. Every time I turn on the lights, she is like ‘Meeeooowww.’”

She also shows off a collection of animal figurines she picked up in Sweden, which look like shrunken versions of the actual things, even covered in real fur. “Can you believe this is a pencil sharpener?” she asks, holding up a fuzzy bunny with a hole in its butt. It kind of gives me the creeps, but Kawai is unfazed. “That’s, like, art.” she says. She would know.