♪♪
-So my name is Ken Taya, also known as Enfu.
My street name is Enfu. [ Chuckles ]
Or maybe I should say, my name is Enfu,
also known as Ken Taya.
♪♪
-He does some of the best work. I have a piece at my house,
and I just am always excited
about the work he has coming out.
♪♪
-I love the color, his illustration work.
He's probably, like, one of the better well-known artists
that came out of Seattle right now.
♪♪
-How I feel when I see his work --
I feel very happy.
♪♪
-There's no one in the Pan-American community
or anyone who's familiar with the Asian-American community
who doesn't know about Enfu.
♪♪
-I was born in Chicago,
and my parents are both Japanese.
They met in college.
I moved to Delaware for most of my childhood -- 7 years --
and then we moved to Seattle.
I think the first encounter that I had
with knowing that I was different
was probably when I got called a "Jap" for the first time,
and that was, like, in third grade.
It was kind of awkward for me.
I didn't understand where that hate was coming from.
We moved to Japan for one year in Sendai.
I moved there When I was in sixth grade.
I thought, "Well, finally,
I'm going back to a place where no one will call me a Jap."
And already middle school was kind of hard
trying to fit in and everything,
and my Japanese was not very good.
They kind of treated me like a disabled child, a little bit.
Like, "Oh, he looks Japanese, but he can't speak.
He must be slow."
You know, being called out for being racially different
kind of sucked.
Then being called out just being different,
but racially the same -- That kind of shook my world.
But there were things that I did well at.
There's a painting class
where they started painting in watercolor.
And it was the first time I touched the medium at all.
I never experienced any painting before.
And then the teacher was really shocked at my ability to paint.
That teacher was really empowering to me,
as I remember it.
He indulged me, and like, "Hey, this is pretty good.
You know, you should you keep doing this."
♪♪
I loved video games growing up.
And, you know, watching Saturday morning cartoons
and playing video games and reading manga --
those are all things that every kid does, I think.
So, you know, I just wanted to make games.
♪♪
Right now, I'm currently a professional game developer --
Doing that for about 11 years now.
The games that I was working on, they were all gritty and horror
real world, first-person shooter-type games.
And I wanted to try something else more artistic.
So I started screen printing.
♪♪
Pull it from this side.
I started selling them at Emerald City Comicon,
and that's kind of my first exposure
to being out there.
The convention scene
was easier for me to get into than,
like, an art gallery scene.
Hello.
-Wait. Is this the one at, uh...
Boosie? -Boosie? Yeah, I did that.
-Oh, that was you! -That's me.
I'm on page 44.
Hundreds of people walking by your work.
You want one, too?
That'll be $60.
-Here you go. -Thank you.
And we'll get them out to you as soon as possible.
And I started realizing --
I need something -- I need content to draw.
I can't just draw a tree, and people like it.
I needed to make it, you know, my tree or not.
So, I was like, "Well, something I care about
and understand are just cultural differences."
♪♪
I found myself defending American views
when I was in Japan and defending Japanese views
when I was in America.
And you're basically this person
who is always taking the other side...
Kind of a bridge --
a person who tries to bridge to two different worlds.
And, you know, you're really presented
with a lot of conflicting values.
♪♪
So I had this period
where I was just combining East and West themes
I coined it "Hybrid Hip Hop."
♪♪
The very first piece was "Tako Truck,"
which is a combination of taco trucks in the U.S.
and then a takoyaki stand or yatai in Japan.
♪♪
And, you know, then I combined Superman and Ultraman.
The superheroes in the U.S. are all very buff.
The superheroes in Japan aren't buff at all.
They're really skinny.
What does that say about masculinity?
♪♪
Whenever I see content that points back to my identity,
it's empowering --
not just Japanese-American specific stuff,
but just empowering other Asian Americans.
♪♪
My daughter came in my life, and it made me soft.
I think being a father makes everybody soft. [ Laughs ]
A lot more of my stuff's now become cute, flowery things.
And I think that generally just appeals to more people.
♪♪
The next step of my commentary was in comic form.
I did "I Fart Rainbow" in a local magazine called Ibuki
for about 3 years.
Social situations are hard, even in one language.
I wanted to be able to comment on that in the comic.
♪♪
Just processing out what I was thinking.
I built an audience of people
that were dealing with their own cross-cultural battles.
-I know a lot of my friends have --
they have a lot of his most recent stuff
up in their apartments, their houses,
and that sort of thing.
And, so, I've kind of known of his art around.
And then finding out on social media
about especially, like, today's drop is pretty cool.
♪♪
-Hey, the Wing Luke crowd.
All right. [ Laughter ]
-I know. I was hoping -- -Here you go.
-Thank you.
-I started selling my work at Kobo,
and my work was well-received here.
-We loved his -- just his sensibility
and this kind of cross-cultural,
you know, Western and Eastern, Japan and America together,
because that's basically what Ken is,
you know, a blending of those two cultures.
A lot of us are blending of those two cultures as well.
-I like the colors he uses. It's quite -- It's fun.
I have this really tall poster of one he did.
It looked like a vending machine,
and it just -- I was like, "I have to have this artist."
And since then we've been stalking him
at every con that we go to.
-Thank you. What's your name?
-Mei. Yeah. -Mei? Nice to meet you.
-I think we harassed you last year at the San Diego Con.
-Oh, really?
-Yeah. -Oh, okay. That's cool.
-Yeah, awesome.
-I'll be there again, full force.
-Okay. We'll see you.
-Yeah. -Thank you.
-Tell your friends. -I will, definitely.
Thank you very much. -Yeah.
♪♪
I've always learned from my dad --
He'd always wake up early in the morning and study,
and I picked up that habit.
But he also encouraged me.
He actually said, before I went to college,
he goes, "You need to learn the value of a dollar."
So he sent me up to Alaska to work in the cannery.
I think the record for how long I worked in one week
was 117 hours, and that was pretty grueling.
That still, by far, is my benchmark
for what hard work is.
♪♪
"Enfu: Cute Grit" is a compilation of 10 years
of my work.
Touches into some of the exploration I did,
some of the struggles I dealt with,
my process, tells kind of -- it lays out how I draw things,
and it explores that transition we're talking about --
from my content changing
from being about my Asian American identity
to just being a father,
and just how that's -- you can see my work change.
[ Applause ]
Well, I appreciate you guys coming out tonight.
I know it's all rainy and everything is all dark,
and it's not really kid-friendly time,
but I appreciate you guys making it.
-[ Laughs ] -No, that's awesome!
-As an artist myself, I like looking at his stuff --
his icons, his little, cute chibis.
It shows a lot of emotions in each one of those.
♪♪
-The big body of work in the book
turned out to be what we began with,
which was just pages and pages and pages
of these amazing chibi characters.
And every time I would look at these pages,
it would make me so tired,
realizing all the time that I went into drawing them.
And as someone who -- I work with visual art all the time,
but don't consider myself that much of a drawer,
and just makes me insanely jealous to see all this stuff.
-These are created with other things in mind.
So not just texting, but games.
♪♪
Module games, matching games, memory games.
♪♪
I have a whole list of games that I want to make with these.
♪♪
-We run into each other in a couple of shows,
and one year, we just, you know, struck up a conversation,
and he's like, "Hey, do you want to collaborate?"
And it'll come off. We started off with hats.
And that's basically how we got started.
-Yeah, I think there's a lot of value in...exploring.
[ Machine beeps ]
-So this particular black and white hat --
we'll put our Enfu and, like, neck pattern
on the inside of the base.
-Would you sign it? -Yeah, of course.
-Just anywhere on the orange.
-On the orange right here? -Yeah.
-All right. -Right on.
-And we're making billfolds, plushies, stuff like that.
We're R&Ding a bunch of things,
resin blocks on the art -- my posters.
Also we're making, like, leggings.
-That you can definitely spot them from a mile away.
And we're looking towards the future,
and we're just thinking of other just fun products
that we can just kind of take it
and put our own spin on it and run with.
-Well, my favorite piece of his is actually --
wasn't like the stuff from Tokyo, you know, like the --
My actually was the bags he did for Uwajimaya.
-The guys at Blue C Sushi approached me and said,
"Would you like to do a mural?"
And, "We want to incorporate the coolness of Tokyo
with kind of a modern American lifestyle."
And in the background, I drew Uwajimaya.
So I made that poster, and we sold it here,
and then...
-We got one of the prints,
and my wife noticed that he has a little sign
that says Uwajimaya in kanji.
And I hadn't noticed it.
So I sent him an e-mail saying, "Thanks for the shout out,
and thanks for including us in your print, and I got one."
And he e-mailed me back the next day and, you know,
said that, you know, he enjoyed shopping at Uwajimaya,
and that if we ever had a project for him
that he'd interested.
-Because it was -- For me,
that was a big part of my childhood.
Uwajimaya was the one place where you see homeless people
that look like you there.
This is a place for me --
is kind of what Uwajimaya became.
I mean, who thinks that about a grocery store?
But, to me, that's what it was. And it was a big deal.
-So I ran it by my boss, and he was in.
So we just started communicating about a bag.
♪♪
-First bag I did with all the stuff coming out of the back --
that's paying homage to their roots.
-We had a lot of sponsors for that.
Next bag was our freshness bag,
which has one side filled with all of our fresh produce,
then flip side has all of our fresh seafood.
♪♪
-They're super detailed.
He was telling me about how many hours he spent
meticulously researching the look and the type of each
and the color of each, like fruit and vegetable
and all the seafood and everything in it.
That really shows the depth and breadth of, like, Asian --
like, basically Asian-American food.
-Every bag really, you know, does well.
-I think through Uwajimaya, people -- all have to do is say,
"You know, the guy that does the Uwajimaya bags?"
Since I have a store in Japantown,
I have kids coming in all the time
with the parents and by themselves,
and it's really fascinating
who is being captured by J-pop and anime and all that.
And it's a tremendous cross-section of America.
I mean, we have kids from the Midwest,
and they were on vacation,
and they want to come down to Japantown,
and they want to go to Kinokuniya,
and they want to, you know, see what Japantown's about.
And Ken fits right into that
of keeping it contemporary and refreshed,
which everything needs to be.
♪♪
It practically evolved out of the idea
that we were gonna do a wayfinding sign
for each of the three sub-neighborhoods of our greater
Chinatown International District neighborhood,
and those would be Japantown, Chinatown, and Little Saigon.
♪♪
Paul Murakami, whose family owns this building,
was saying, you know, "We need something that's fun
if we're gonna do something kind of untraditional
for wayfinding, like wrapping switch boxes."
-I'll let you do your thing.
-And then, right there, I mean, it came up in a discussion.
And it was -- everyone in the group knew who Ken was
and recognized him.
It was a pretty easy sell if you would, you know.
♪♪
-I'm so happy to see this,
You've been talking about it for a while.
-I know it's been a long time, right?
-Yeah. -Yeah.
♪♪
Looks good. -Good job, man.
-Oh, thank you. Thank you. -That's awesome.
-We're gonna have one up on 5th and Main,
and then one down here on Maynard and Jackson.
The one directly outside of Momo
will say "Japantown" on it.
♪♪
These are the ones that are actually gonna have
wayfinding signs on them.
♪♪
-There's a dichotomy of preservation.
Again, when you preserve something,
you preserve something that's old.
So you got to re-interpret it to make it appealing
to younger people.
Young people have a hard time putting value on those things,
and the older you get, you value those.
Just by the way I'm drawing it,
giving it a kind of a modern spin or modern interpretation.
It reminds people of anime in games.
It's -- every artist does this. They make the old new again.
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
-Okay. Oh, I just absolutely love it.
I feel like it really brightens up our corner,
and it brings attention to what we're trying to accomplish
in this neighborhood.
I think it's really wonderful.
It's very attractive to, I think,
people of all ages and all cultures.
It's really happy-making.
♪♪
-My vision for art is I believe
that it should be enjoyed and consumed.
I consume all these things all of my life,
so I feel like I can give back.
♪♪
-He does so much charity work.
He donates so much of his stuff and his time.
He gets his name out there. It's great.
-He does a lot of festivals, does a lot of community events.
-He's grown so much in the years that I've seen.
Like, going from, like, doing the smaller events,
now going off --
Now he's in New York City Comic Con.
He's doing more things in San Diego Comic-Con.
It is significant.
-He's a great, great role model for young people
who want to pursue doing something creatively.
-We're always talking about the new work that's coming out
and really excited about just seeing any new creations
he has to bring to the public.
-Yeah, the list is long. It's never ending.
I have no shortage of work to create for myself. [ Laughs ]
But, again, when I say work, it's fun for me.
I just love to draw. I've always loved to draw since I was a kid.
You know, my best mode is -- I have coffee, and I have music,
and I'm just drawing.
And I could do that for forever.
♪♪