Mei Kazama

DRAWING AS DESTINATION FOREVER ARRIVING

The cut is possibility. 
– Eva Hayward ¹


I’ve tried not to write about these ghosts.
As if this too does not turn a child

to narrative. As if this too does not demand
a kind of work. But boy after boy after boy

after boy after girl after sweet outline of a boy–
& have you ever known a body not to be haunted?

– Cameron Awkward-Rich ²

On Drawing

Drawing is elusive, existing as verb and noun, and as medium and practice. Within art historical discourse, drawing has moved across numerous positions. It has occupied connections to invention and disegno, has been regarded as preparatory or secondary to other mediums, and has undergone conceptual revaluation in the West from the 1950s.³ Institutionally, it continues to fall under painting in the hierarchy of image-making, but its primacy also holds foundational significance. Drawing, in this way, holds ambivalence, being both “central and marginal.”⁴ It challenges discourse of the preparatory and complete, the finished and unfinished, and the relationship between means and end. It has the capacity to generate thought and hold immediacy, contingency, and mediation at once and in ways that complicate distinction. It is a medium that is acting in its own right and moving with its own conditions.

As Amy Sillman expresses, drawers are “people who don’t quite know what they’re doing.”⁵ This statement is not to say that drawers literally do not know what we are doing, or are artists without rigor. Rather, it is to name drawers as those who engage in a process of building, where one line leads to the next and to the next without it being dictated by a predetermined end. Following Gertrude Stein’s notion that the temporality of the continuous present is the continuous present, “a drawing is drawing, is drawing, is drawing.”⁶ Building and generating in the continuous present requires an attention to emerging form made possible through persistent renewal of one’s devotion to the unknown. Such devotion in drawing calls in the body, with drawing being a mechanically driven medium where marks are created by movement of the hand. Also named “the thinking hand” by architect Juhani Pallasmaa, the hand in mechanical mark making is not limited to the area between the wrist and the fingertips, but it also accounts for the hand in dynamic relation to the rest of the body and its imaginations. Building upon Pallasmaa’s interpretation of the hand as delta and periphery, mathematician Juliette Kennedy names the bidirectional movement that occurs through the hand in terms of subjectivity, relation to the world, and action.⁷ The porosity of the hand as it links the body and the world is inherent for me when speaking of mechanical mark making. As such, I cannot separate drawing from the conditions of my life. To draw as a trans Asian American body expands theorization of thinking with the hand with consideration of the line that arrives from the body – a body in relation to the spectral, opacity, and the marginal.

Drawing Through this Body

I was born able to see ghosts. The universe made sure that I could, so that I could see my own, so that I could survive. Knowing ghosts kept me alive. I have witnessed ghosts of my dead kin, ghosts whose gender expressions taught me vision and desire, and my own ghost of past, changing, and future versions of myself. You could say my body is haunted by its own ghost. I have known my ghost to be inside, beside, and in front of me. I have observed it resting on the surface of my skin, against the contour of my chest. Its visibility arrives as I emerge. As an artist who draws, and whose body is directly implicated in mechanical mark-making, I approach this haunting curiously and seriously. 

To see ghosts is to persistently experience simultaneous grief and possibility. My drawings reflect my experiences around death and Japanese rituals of communicating with the dead. They inhabit destinations where knowing and unknowing, departure and arrival, and surrender and endurance coexist. In and through the drawn line, emergence suspends itself in the threshold between my body and its ghost, arriving like a flame emerging in water.

The contours of my body do not operate towards a teleological narrative, where my gender arrives out of and into a trans body that once haunted me. There is not a merging of body and ghost, but rather a friction between the two that births an understanding of another form of being and becoming – proximity generating heat. Upon such encounters between the seemingly living and dead, there is not a coalescence of past and present but rather an understanding of another temporality where the past is not past. There is not a collapse of visibility and invisibility, but rather outlines cleaving new sensations of presence.

On Drawing as Destination

I propose a framework of drawing as destination. To call it destination is, firstly, to continue to claim drawing’s status as that which can be and is in service to itself. It is also to seek beyond binaristic frameworks drawing inherently elides. Drawing as destination does not enclose drawing as teleological, and it is a space not to be moved through to reach an end of a binary or of a passage towards resolution. Rather, drawing as destination upholds drawing as an interstice to be actively inhabited for the possibility of the irresolute, while maintaining the endurance to both live in this world and cultivate new ways of being, knowledge, and sensation. 

Drawing as destination does not make obsolete or collapse other destinations. It is a location of its own that requires new understandings of knowing and being by shifting what is known into other forms of possibilities. This parallels what Eva Hayward describes as transposition: “transposition is not interpenetration, not about broken boundaries; it is, instead, an expressive excitation that acts between others because they are others.”⁸ Drawing as destination centers transposition, creatively visualizing alternative knowledge without negating the reality of that which attempts to define the edges of our being in totalizing ways. Possibility dwells in the preposition where edges function within the generative. Drawing is not preparatory or complete, but rather a destination conjuring its own continuously arriving form. 

Engaging with drawing as destination through a haunted body is to (re)consider the site from which a line emerges and how the line is read. The outline of the interstice is a threshold marked by the edges of my body and my ghost, and the line as outline demarcates what can be read as positive and negative space. Generally, the space of my body and my ghost would be considered positive space. If the threshold is negative space, it is perhaps the in-between, gap, or break that embraces what is not (yet) nameable. Awkward-Rich’s “outline of a boy”⁹ asks how image and form can be read as the negative space where possibility exists. The threshold/negative space is where there is persistence towards meaning that is forever arriving and never concrete.

The Line, the Cut, and Emergence

The horizon line is like a cut in the sky. From which the sun emerges as and into itself. 

The horizon line is like a cut in the sky, from which the sun rises to confirm our life in this universe. 

The lines on my chest are traces of a cut in my body, from which there is also emergence, confirming something about my body and my body’s ability to be alive. The horizon line is like a cut in the sky, of an always reaching toward, in the name of queer futurity by way of José Esteban Muñoz. 

The lines on my chest are a cut in my body, of a continual becoming, reaching in all directions in the spaces between categories but never able or wanting to become them, remaining in the possibility of the continual impossibility of my body. Sometimes, it’s as if I or my ghost emerge from the lines on my chest, as if the sun emerges from the horizon creating a wash that is a specter of aura. 

The lines on my chest also bring me back closer to myself to understand this thing called transition, as if the setting sun submerges into the cut of the horizon to understand this thing called time. The lines of my chest are as visual as the line of the horizon. The lines of my chest are as porous as the line of the horizon. The lines of my chest are as confirming as the line of the horizon. The lines of my chest are as relational as the line of the horizon. The lines of my chest are as much of a mark towards language as is the line of the horizon. Scar. Skyline. Limit.

My lines enact a kind of cut when I deboss into the surface of the paper. With a metal drawing tool and through my hand/body, a physical yet nearly invisible cut arrives into the paper. It is made most visible as line when graphite is rubbed over, making the new contour of the debossed surface of the paper into an image. I think about my body’s relation to the cut in relation to line and emergence. I think about the sensation of my body’s death and emergence through surgical incision, and I think about desiring something else and drawing new physical contours toward other forms of feeling and language. Vivian Huang writes that “knowledge of the body’s meaning, then, is not an end in itself but bespeaks the desire to have a relationship to one’s emotions, sensations, and material body.”¹⁰ My body connects the tool that incises my body with the tool that incises paper.  The cut/line is not just about finding ways to exist with a desire for feeling – it is also about emergence through sensation.

Enduring the Continuous Present

Grief is its own subject, and sometimes, it feels too large even for drawing to hold.  I am reminded that in realms surrounded by impossibility, to endure is to mourn, and mourning holds grief that is forever arriving. Grief continually arrives at the threshold of life, as the line continually arrives in the realm of drawing. To draw is to endure through the line of grief. The line in drawing infinitely arrives and persistently becomes, in its grief and in its possibility, as a devotional elegy for life.

Engaging with all that persistently arrives in the continuous present is an act of endurance. I turn to drawing as a way to hold, engage with, and seek possibility in the impossible. To inhabit the threshold between the edges of impossibility and possibility is to navigate what it means to be suspended in the tides rippling from the edges of category and language and to weather unnameable space that rests upon death.

I think about private and public violences that have resulted in death, my personal experiences around death, the dead who came before me, and the deaths I experience with my body through transition. I reflect on death not just within the binary of life and death, or death in the imperialist economy of the valuation of one life over another. I think about the possibility of death as a passage towards desire. Death is not a compass but instead a force that conditions engagement – like weather interacting with bodies. In my transition, the death-space of surgery is a passage that cultivates my active engagement with the world. The wind touching my chest in the form of a line generates a new sensation of desire to remain with the world. Death as passage is a force that creates desire centering an active “with” with the world.

In this morning as I wake, I think of you. Today, you’ve appeared prior to the sun. In my arrival in the womb you once inhabited, I felt your grief. Blood, as current, carries grief. When you emerged you tried to bleed as much of the grief out as possible. I know that this made it possible for me to arrive, alive. When I think about my transition, I also think of you. I refuse to forget about you. You are now a ghost of a body whose endurance could no longer endure, and I am a living body that is enduring. Sometimes I wonder if you and I are of the same being or ghost or shadow or body, attempting to emerge between these edges of grief, violence, possibility, and love.

Elegy and Suspension as Possibility

To remain in the destination of drawing that is the interstice of death is to engage with the continuous present that is a past not past. It is visibility that does not forget and cannot escape from conditions of invisibility. There is push and pull in attuning myself in the world and in drawing with a consciousness towards survival. Drawing in this state becomes an elegy for the dying, the dead, and the dead (re)emerging, all at once. How do I find the possibility of emergence under conditions of death? How do I remain in the destination of drawing and continue to draw when the dead reappear only to reemerge into conditions of death in the continuous present?

Suspension is the state from which I draw.  It is a state of active engagement of remaining in the interstitial destination of drawing, to find a way to be in the intertwine and release between two ends or opposing forces. To remain in suspension is also to inhabit a state where there is constant negotiation with what surfaces, alongside surface conditions. In drawing, and on a material level, different types of paper and mark-making tools have varying responses to demands of the line, and to be sensitive to this negotiation is to be sensitive towards possibility.

For example, frottage is a mark-making of desire and of something to come, made possible through pressure and friction. What is applied against substrate arrives as image, or as shadow, or as specter caught between naming and possibility. Like my great grandmother’s gravesite crest, emerging on paper via pressure of graphite in my hand as a ghostly form. Like my pre-surgery chest blooming onto paper with my body pressing itself flat into an image of planets abreast. Frottage is a mark-making that suspends the complete arrival of image and language, and I understand drawing and writing as one. As Steffani Jemison expresses, “I have made a mark, and I do not know whether I am drawing or writing”.¹¹ Drawing as destination, in suspension, understands meaning as something that continually arrives as something that is not concrete.

Negotiating the pressure applied between tool and substrate in drawing and engaging with the limits of each is to experience suspension on the level of the mark, negotiating marks to emerge along the edges of death and possibility. Suspension is everything but passive, requiring focus, energy, and attunement, especially as a state that actively calls in what surrounds. At the same time, how does one maintain openness to the fluidity, flexibility, and possibility that suspension can offer, as a state that is not and does not move toward a distinct end? What does it mean to surrender in a state of suspension?

Drawing Devotion

I emerged into a grief whose weight made an imprint, into which my body surrendered upon its arrival. Grief as current is a specter of sorts, as a grief transpired through everything and everyone that came before me in this life. The current that coursed through them now courses through me, coursing, coursing, and coursing, as if to shade, towards presence, into form, becoming shadow, becoming ghost, becoming boy, becoming shape, becoming image, becoming language, becoming death, and becoming possibility all at once.

I understand drawing to be an embodied practice that is activated through devotional accumulation of line. It is embodied as a medium that calls forth and necessitates the indexical mark of the hand, and it is a practice of accumulation because devotion necessitates constancy. Accumulation calls forth emergence in drawing, in the way that endless reiteration of loss drives rupture, and in the way that ritual sustains practice. Such accumulation creates edges that materialize trace before it materializes form. A line is generative, whether it is towards subject, space, object, or areas in between. It is a gesture of possibility. You can say the lines of my chest are a drawing, and there is friction between my body and my chest, that is chest and also image, an image that I can read as masculine, as two glimmering suns above a horizon, as ghosts of breasts, and as a quiet blaze I feel when most alive. Drawing is a motion to become, where becoming is becoming, is becoming, is becoming.

All images are courtesy of Mei Kazama, and all rights and permissions belong to the artist.

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¹ Eva Hayward, “Spiderwomen: Notes on Transpositions” in Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition (New Directions in American History, 2012), 100.
² Cameron Awkward-Rich, Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), 57.
³ Bernice Rose, Drawing Now, (The Museum of Modern Art, 1976), 9-19. 
⁴ Pamela Lee, “Some Kinds of Duration: The Temporality of Drawing as Process Art” in Cornelia Butler’s Afterimage: Drawing through Process (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge MIT Press, 1999), 31. 
⁵ Amy Sillman, “Drawing in the Continuous Present,” Draw In: Conversations and Lectures on Drawing and Its Resonances, Jan 13, 2017, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, 16:23-16:27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLOgc466nRk.
⁶ Rosario Güiraldes, “A drawing is drawing,” in Drawing Papers 147: Drawing in the Continuous Present (New York: The Drawing Center, 2022), 11.
⁷ Juliette Kennedy, “Notes on the Syntax and Semantics Distinction, or Three Moments in the Life of the Mathematical Drawing” in What Is a Mathematical Concept, (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 66-69. 
⁸ Eva Hayward, “Spiderwomen” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017), 266.
⁹ Awkward-Rich, 57. 
¹⁰ Vivian L. Huang, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (Duke University Press, 2022), 103.
¹¹ Steffani Jemison, “Drafts: Steffani Jemison on the Stroke, the Glyph, and the Mark,” Artforum, Sept. 26, 2023, http://www.artforum.com/print/201904/steffani-jemison-on-the-stroke-the-glyph-and-the-mark-78965.