We’re always looking to reinterpret our work into ways that blur the lines between print methods to arrive at… well, we don’t know. Not in words. But we know it when we see it. And when we see it, we say we don’t know. But we see it. And we know it, but we can’t say we know it because we can’t say it. Get it? Got it? Great!

so let’s TRY TO talk about this first poster print we’re offering to the world…

We had heard and read a lot, throughout our life, about the levels of culture shock folks from western countries face when visiting Japan and we were expecting something similar, which it (mostly) wasn’t, maybe on account of us being of Chinese heritage? Maybe? We don’t know. There’s a lot of bull crap people say that everyone is expected to acknowledge as though it were true and use as the basis for discussion. This maybe explains why we don’t like discussing much about anything with folks. Suffice it to say, we went around Japan in late 2023, camera in hand.

Trees, for us, are not static objects. We see them as being in constant movement. We believe they move and writhe and ‘dance’ to best survive and thrive, but maybe there are other motivations we don’t understand and maybe never can. We are not trees, after all. Even if we were, could one individual (tree) ever understand *all* individuals? Our (extremely) limited understanding of Japanese gardening and landscaping techniques is that the branching out of a tree isn’t left to the tree to decide by itself. The human caretaker cuts the branch(es), creating a hurdle for the tree’s path of branching out, and the tree then grows its branches around the cutting (or hurdle). The process becomes a forever cycle of hurdle and growth. The way we see it, it’s a back-and-forth tango between human and tree.

In the spring of 2025, when we began applying half-toning to some of our photographs, as an experiment, we realized that by making them look less photo-realistic, that we could better arrive at the essence behind the picture. So by making a picture look less ‘real’, this would reveal something present that photo-realism was filtering out. We then chose to entitle this image ‘NIHON NO TANGO’ or ‘THE JAPANESE TANGO’.

behold the full poster in all its ink-drenched risographic glory!

The advantage of printing with a Japanese stencil duplicator, to create risograph prints, that look like nothing else. The ink doesn’t fully dry, there are imperfections all around, and you likely have to deal with some technician/gatekeeper who knows the mystical ways of the machine that you can’t know. The process, however, of achieving that print has been at times painful, torturous, and absolutely rewarding for us. We have found ourselves tangoing with this very print medium which makes us believe it’s *precisely* the medium with which this image needs to be printed. Don’t ask why, we can’t answer that question. And if we did, it would be a load of bull. If you’d like to pay us to give you bull, we will. That’s what many artists do (us included) while holding out the hat for you to throw change into it. But seeing as you’re not paying us for anything right now, we have nothing to say.

If you want to discourage us from making more prints like these, please avoid purchasing a copy from our shop.

We will be adding more poster prints as we put them out there, into the universe. Wish us luck, dear internet friend. For now: click here to purchase this poster from our shop.