Dan Obana in his studio We tend to think of digital and analog art-making practices as antithetical or incompatible, but in Dan Obana’s work the two styles and strategies strike a unique balance. Based in Tokyo, he was working as a graphic designer when he developed a digital technique based on the 19th century Japanese woodblock printing tradition Hanga. After dubbing this new method Digital Hanga, Obana began to explore its myriad possibilities. By melding collage, photography, print-making and even sculptural three-dimensional shading effects, he crafts meticulous digital prints whose intricate details act like so many building blocks in the spectacularly patterned compositions.

His rich canvases reward both distant and close readings, with small fragments of images and text presenting viewers with a puzzle-like enigma that also contributes to the overall mosaic quality of each work. Many pieces feature silhouettes, bodies and faces, but these human figures are never the sole focus. They exist on a picture plane that Obana fractures, picks over and reassembles in a thrilling patchwork. Especially in pieces dominated by monochrome earth tones, he performs radical experiments where bodies and movements fault and crack like parched desert ground. Appropriately, these fragmented and reconstituted shapes often evoke Cubism, as though we’re seeing one entity in multiple states simultaneously.

When Obana’s collage prints are more extremely disjointed, the effect is closer to Dadaism. Chunks of photographs and typography float in patterns of scraps and shapes, and formal, abstract properties like color, shape, rhythm and composition become the most striking. 
He updates the flattened picture planes of 20th century collage by reintroducing depth and suggestions of pictorial space.

His Digital Hanga technique makes the distinction between volume and flatness virtually imperceptible. The resulting optical illusions give the impression of bas-relief collections of images, type and tones, despite being printed flat onto canvases. Obana’s work explores spaces that are collapsed planes one moment and mysterious depths the next. At the crackling edge where exquisite surfaces split and peel to reveal eerie chasms, he invites us to discover inner spaces.

http://hobana.cocolog-nifty.com

www.Agora-Gallery.com/ArtistPage/Dan_OBANA.aspx