Lichiban (aka Licsi) is a talented visual artist with a passion for art, music, and humanitarian work. Check the interview below…

Why are you an artist?

I think most visual artists have a story beginning with “I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid…”. Mine is no different, except that I spent a lot of years battling the idea of becoming an artist. I was a very active kid…always creating something, organizing my friends into teams (I had a band when I was 7), singing in a choir, entering poetry contests, choreographing dance routines for my girlfriends, but painting and drawing was my number one form of self-expression. I grew up as an only child, and there was a lot of pain around me in my family…I guess painting was my private little fortress where I could retreat to when I felt lonely. It was a form of therapy and, of course, also play. Kids are like mini gods, creating and destroying imaginary worlds through play. So to go back to your question, for a long time, I wasn’t ready to share and expose my fortress and become an artist. I was also turned off by some of the massive egos you find in the art world…I kept choosing other carrier paths and kept the drawing to myself, but as I realize now, I was only going around circles. I would start a job or a course of study only to realize later that it didn’t move me enough to pour all my passion into it. I always had a lot of creative energy and it’d always depress me if I couldn’t get to express it in a way that is truly honest to who I am. Only two years ago, that I started to take my calling to be an artist more seriously and I finally walked the inner painter out of the hidden fortress! It is incredible liberating to finally unite WORK and PLAY! You know you’re doing something right when you can’t wait to get to your studio and start a new project…

Of course, now I also realize that you don’t have to have a massive ego to be and succeed as an artist, and as long as you maintain your integrity, remain truthful to yourself, and do your work with a certain sense of humility toward your craft, it is perfectly alright to be an artist:).

I know you’ve done a lot of portrait work (of course my favorite is the ‘i heart beats’ one). What do you enjoy about doing portraits?

Ahhh, I could go on forever about this question…Faces were always my favorite subjects, even as a little girl. I love the fact that each face is totally unique, and through looking at faces you can really witness the beauty of variety among human beings (admittedly, I stare at people a lot, but I try to do it in the most discreet manner…it’s part of my job, sorry!). The world is like a kaleidoscope for me, and each face is like a new combination of the main ingredients. I travel a lot, but I don’t care too much for the tourist sights…I go for the people, to get a sense of how they live, love, struggle, or express themselves. Portraits have amazing power to touch people’s soul directly, because emotional expressions speak to you without words.

I think if one truly loves people and the stories they carry, one can attune to the finer dimensions of the face until the facial expressions begin to tell the story of that person. Sometimes I get inspired by someone’s face (and of course the deeper story behind it) and I will ask the person if I can paint him or her. I usually take photos of people I want to paint and while doing that I began to realize how important my attitude toward my subject is. Through taking a lot of photos of my friends, I realize how necessary is to make the subject feel that they are in a safe place to show their inner beauty completely…Because I love and acknowledge people’s beauty freely, I think people do open up to me and show their most stunning expressions. When I talk about beauty, I don’t mean necessarily the conventional images of pretty faces…I find beauty in intense expressions of grief, anger, excitement, in the faces of children at play, or in the wrinkles of dignified old people who carry many generations of stories.

Ultimately, I believe that looking at a face that is revealing its inner beauty is actually healing…and that is because, I believe, there is a divine source for that healing beauty. So painting portraits is a spiritual exercise for me. When I pour a lot of love in a face, I hope I can transfer that into the image in a way that when people look at it they will recognize the spark of divine beauty. Having said that I do try to leave some room for expressing my darker side; without some balance, you can go off the path developing hidden internal enemies that might suddenly come out of hiding once and turn your world upside down. I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with my inner demons and I am happy to say that all that time struggling to find a way of TAMING them made me much stronger.

What other artists have inspired you, and how?

Hmm, there are so many! I spent a lot of my high school years away from my classes in the art library, studying and reading up on dadaist and surrealists painters. I love Dali’s crazy liquid visual world and Max Ernst’s sensual dreamscapes…Ernst is one of the few surrealists I know who had a strong spiritual side, and that was very inspiring to me. Of course the two pioneers, Frida Kahlo & Basquiat, who dared to push their boundaries to places most people are too uncomfortable to venture.

I grew up in Hungary, and the eastern European aesthetics of Alfons Mucha and other art nouveau artists and architects are ingrained in my visual vocabulary. Austro-Hungarian art nouveau was a little darker, twisted, and incorporated more masculine imagery than its Czech counterpart, which seems to me focused more on the angelic, sunnier form of femininity. Still, art nouveau and deco has been very much a source of inspiration for me in my attempts at expressing a whole range of female sensuality from provocative, dark and sexy to spiritual and playful. I love the works of many 19 th century fantasy illustrators, as I like to do detailed hand drawings reminiscent of old engravings. I also have a special weakness for the aesthetics of 70s and 80s American pop culture, such as soul & disco album cover illustrations, and old school hip-hop visuals…some of the freshest images came of out that era. Right now, I’m actually working on trying to combine these together in a fresh way…we’ll see what comes out of it.

There are so many artists working today I could list as influential. I love the works of a lot of young Asian artists, like Sylvia Ji, Audrey Kawasaki, Yoskay Yamamoto, and my friend, Kenji who designed the cover for your album. I love underground pop and street artists, many of whom have now become major players in the art world. I find the works of Mode2, Doze Green, WK, Barry McGee, and countless graf writers very inspirational.

You’ve worked with human rights programs, right? How has humanitarianism played a part in your creative career?

Yeah, I volunteered during the summer of 2004 at refugee camps in Hungary, and in 2005 I got an Amnesty International grant to do volunteer work for the Cordelia Foundation (Hungary), an organization that offers psychiatric and psychosocial care to torture survivors and other serious trauma victims of organized violence in refugee camps. Doing this kind of work will change you forever. When you see people who are stripped of everything —their homeland, their family, and their dignity— stranded in a country they don’t speak the language of, and yet they are STILL willing to get up in the morning and believe that if they just try harder they will be able to rebuild their life is very very inspiring. It puts things in perspective, and you will realize how much of your life, your relative freedom and safety you take for granted daily. I ended up writing a report about the human rights violations that border guards in Asia and Europe regularly commit against refugees, and I also helped someone to get asylum in Hungary.

I think it was working in the refugee camps and listening to people’s life stories that made me I realize how important it is to tell people’s stories and give a voice to those who have been forced into silence . I think I do it with my portraits, while others do it with photography, film, music, poetry, or story telling. Much of the hatred that one group of people have for another is because in the process of distancing themselves from the Other, they dehumanize the Other. I believe that a portrait has the potential humanizing power, so it becomes harder for the viewer to dismiss or hate that person behind the portrait. For example, certain people in the West who live isolated from the world in their comfortable communities of sameness might say yes to the cluster bombing of an Afghan village out of anger toward a perceived united Afghan enemy, but I think (or at least I hope) if they were to look into the portrait of an Afghan child or a woman who have spent 30 years of her life in the worst destitution, their compassion would override their anger and hatred, and maybe would inspire them to learn more about the complexities of Afghan culture and politics. Of course, exactly because of the symbolic and emotional power of portraits, they can also be used to manipulate people into hating others…I guess everything in the world has the potential to damage as much it has to heal.

I definitely would like to continue to combine my humanitarian interests with my art activities. My latest project is curating an all-female underground art show with a friend. It is called GIRLS DREAM IN COLOR, for which I chose Project Joy (http://www.projectjoy.com/ ), a non-profit organization that uses play to strengthen and heal children whose lives have been deeply impacted by trauma. Having chosen this charity that highlights the role of women as artists and mothers, I would like to emphasize and honor the power of the life-giving feminine creative force.

Hmm, as you can see, trauma and healing are two major players in my creative development.

I’m a music producer, so I’m interested in who you’re feeling right now. What music is inspiring to you?

Aside from drawing, music is my other fortress…it never lets me down! I always listen to music when I work on my paintings, so there is always a live feed of sound filtered into my work. These days, I listen to a lot of my friends’ tracks, like those of Sarah White (hard-to-define nu jazzy, soulful hip-hop melodies), Dolphin (multigenre ranging from hip-hop to nu jazz) and Kon & Amir (rare disco & Latin jazz) who just came out with OFF TRACK (vol.1) on BBE, though I probably listened to their On Track (vol. 6) the most, which is one of the illest beat-heavens ever. I love broken beat, and I’m constantly on the lookout for new stuff in that genre, like work that you put out and peeps like Mark Clive de-Lowe or Bugz in the Attic for instance. I just recently found an internet radio station, Elevation Radio, that has dope podcasts, it is a great way to learn about the hottest new acts out there.

I noticed that when I want to draw something sexy and edgy, I subconsciously choose underground hip-hop classics, like Mos Def, Eric B & Rakim, De La Soul, Digable Planets, A Tribe Called Quest, J Dilla, Bahamadia, older Outkast and Nas, or other more recent joints like those of DJ Spinna, Jazzy Jeff, Herbaliser, DJ Vadim, or Nightmares on Wax…and the list won’t stop!

You recently took part in a skateboard art show called Hit the Deck. Can you tell me about your decks?

I loved doing these decks! Animals play different symbolic roles in my life and they regularly feature in my dreams. I think that the animal that corresponds to me the most is the snow leopard, which is why I put the cub on my heart in the first deck. Snow leopards live in Central Asia (mostly in the Himalayas), and who knows I might have some sort of deep ancestral connection with them (Hungarians came from Inner Asia and had a shamanic tradition before they settled in Europe). The other one with the cat is inspired by Lili, my cat and best friend during my teens…she was tragically (perhaps unintentionally) poisoned by our neighbor. That creature was a big fluffy ball of love and grace, and she definitely held the light up for me during the darkest moments in those days. I wanted to play with the idea of morphing myself into her or vice versa , and bringing her spirit back this way. It is one variation of a theme of shape shifting that interests me these days. The middle one is called ‘You Just Walked All Over Me’, for which I turned the skate deck into a naked female body and had sneakers going all over it (after all it is a skateboard, right?)…It’s a playful reflection on the feeling of getting hurt by a lover who, well, manages to walk all over you. As you can tell, I left the heart intact and by crowning it I made it into the victorious one. Love wins out, even if you end up having someone temporarily hurt your feelings…I mean at the end of the day, you still have you and your capacity to love…someone else, haha!

What’s going on with Legends of Style?

I worked with Legends of Style on their last major group art show earlier this year. LOS has become known as the largest urban/ graffiti/ pop art showcase in Boston, and I had a chance to curate their last 50+ artist group show, called “Surreal City”. It was a massive production, with more than 900 people in the house, and except for the MCing part, all the elements of hip-hop were represented: we had Kon & Amir spinning old school mixtape-style battle breaks, bboys getting down, and of course a lot of graf artists showing their works. I tried to incorporate the representatives of other new underground art genres (such as pop surrealists and art that spun off of street art)…it was an amazingly fun experience, and curating art shows is definitely one of the things I would like to be doing in the future beside painting. After that I got involved in other projects, so I’m not working for LOS anymore. Anyway, I think that they are planning their next big event in Delaware these days.

What are you working on right now? What can we look forward to seeing from you?

I am in a very productive phase these days…I’ve been doing a lot of portraits… I submitted a piece for the WORD OF MOUTH group show during Art Basel in Miami… I am working on a painting about (huh, more) heartbreak…I want to do more skate decks (maybe continue the series) and do more funny illustrations inspired by hip-hop, funk, and disco (like the “Werewolves know it better…”)…I have a list of to-do images so long that it will keep me busy for months…I am moving to New York very soon, and my only hope is that I will be able to quickly set up a workplace where I can continue to work on these projects.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Art, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.