As a painter and fine art photographer, Nu’a Bon (1954, Hawai’i) draws on personal experiences and memories, working within the politics of gender, race, war, diaspora, climate change, and identity. His tools are simple, beginning with a list of hundreds of conflict sites across North America. A custom-built mobile expedition studio allows him to paint in remote areas; earth pigments and water are collected from each painting site, and polymer binders mixed by wind, rain, and snow flow onto linen canvas unrolled on the ground. Master painting classes in Paris showed him how paint moves and blends. Bon has a deep aesthetic awareness of composition, colour, and tonality as a former workshop student of photographers Ansel Adams and Minor White in the late 70s, followed by two decades as an international photojournalist. Educated at the University of Hawai’i, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research, Bon is a former NGO research fellow and a new media arts professor in China and Hong Kong. During his sabbaticals and for many years after teaching, he studied with tribal plant spirit healers in the Amazon, the High Andes, and Africa, and the wealth of their knowledge is infused in his work.
Painting studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico
“Nu’a Bon’s imagery intersects at the margins of visual and biological economies. An archive and a respite from literality, Bon’s borrowed view moves the images into a state of tendency, a possibility of what is real to become what is real for the viewer. Philosopher Henri Bergson expresses the concept of the real and the possible:
“To form a general idea is to abstract from varied and changing things a common aspect, which does not change or at least offers an invariable hold to our action.”
Although debunked majestically in critical circles, photographs may still give us a fascinating insight into life, into the real, as it is actually lived. The essential character of a life through photography is character with distance from us. It is a property with a certain degree of readability and another necessary and differentiated degree of utility. Photographs are now no different than other images without motion; they move only when they are viewed and tell only what our experience will allow. They are light, they are time, they are the space of the encounter. They are all these things simultaneously. Life and Photography don't offer very much. Its meaning may only be derived by visiting the same places over and over again. Finding oneself in the explosive, emergent arena as a kind of labyrinth. There will never again be something so free. Everything is, because of our viewing and because of its place in artistic making, impermanent. This includes relations. Their freedom is their virtuality. Their sense of play is their inherent instability.”
—Aesthetica Magazine