Keeping in Touch

A mnemonic device is a strategy for learning and retaining information. For multidisciplinary artist Max Guy, the act of image-making functions as one such technique for language learning: through a process of revisiting and reworking print material from around his studio into new collages depicting hiragana and kanji, two sets of Japanese characters, Guy performs a practice of visual recitation, repeating the characters he is learning over and over again. With each collage, the artist commits the character to memory more deeply, while simultaneously playing with the memory of the images themselves: the found photographs, notes, and magazine spreads that make their way into these works hold their own history, too. In the following collages and reflection, he explores the kanji hito or jin, translated to English as “person,” and walks through his path to using collage as a method of language learning.

BY MAX GUY

I started by cutting a square hole through my favorite Guyton/Walker monograph, which scratched my itch to unlearn the cynicism that haunted my student experience. If it’s possible to use collage to help with language learning, what kind of voice could I cultivate with the destruction of icons as a foundation? I used all of the paper in my studio to develop a system of collage that could double as a mnemonic technique, where compositions use Japanese writing as an orthographic reference. 

I couldn’t take an intro course as a graduate student, so I studied Japanese independently, using every bit of Japanese trivia I’d ever learned to develop a syllabus for myself. I’m what some people would call an otaku, a person whose social life and identity largely centers around the media they obsessively consume and collect (sometimes to the detriment of their social life). The word derives from a Japanese term for home, speaking to the rich but confounding inner lives of these dandy-homebodies. As a kid growing up in downtown New York City, I was exposed to Japanese-imported comics, video games, and animation in the stores that populated lower Manhattan. Otaku culture was once the glue for my best friendships and is fundamental to my overall formulation of what art can be. This mode of working was self-affirmation at a challenging time in my life.