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DEXTA MEGA

@dextamega

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Founding Figure - MUR • Tokyo Graffiti Movement
Artist in Residence @ MUTANT GENESIS
Japanese Underground | Spatial Systems | AI

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2018

Trinidad

Looking back,

I sometimes think I left Japan at exactly the right moment.

Not because I wanted to leave.

Because I had reached the end of one era.

What followed wasn’t retirement.

It wasn’t starting over.

It was another apprenticeship.

This time,

the teacher wasn’t a city.

It was the place I had been born.

I didn’t know it then.

I thought I was travelling.

In reality,

I had begun another period of discovery.

Not of a country.

Of identity.

Of memory.

Of sound.

Of ancestry.

Of direction.

Sometimes you have to leave the place that made you…

to understand the place that made you possible.

#DextaMega
#Trinidad
#Discovery
#LifeJourney
#Identity taken in Arima,Trinidad & Tobago by @dextamega

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2

a month ago

For years I wasn’t particularly interested in explaining any of this.

Besides, who really wants to read a fancy CV?

Then time passed.

People disappeared.

Memories changed.

Stories became cleaner than they really were.

More singular.

Some became bigger.

Some became smaller.

Some disappeared completely.

The catalyst wasn’t these posts.

It was a research project.

While working on a historical study of the rise and transformation of Japanese graffiti, I found myself returning to old photographs, interviews, letters, sketches, events and conversations.

At first I was looking for the story.

Then I accepted that I had been inside of it.

The further I went, the more details returned.

Things I had forgotten.

Things I remembered differently.

Things that only made sense after I had put enough distance between myself and them in late 2017.

The posts started almost as notes.

A way to jog my memory.

A place to experiment with writing.

To see what happened when memory met documentation.

What became interesting wasn’t certainty.

It was contradiction.

How different people remembered the same events.

How stories changed depending on who was telling them.

How entire chapters could disappear while others became mythology.

I realized that if I didn’t eventually tell at least one of my versions, somebody else might tell it.

Or worse, tell it as their own.

As is already happening.

Memory isn’t fixed.

Sometimes you have to walk back through it to understand where you actually were.

Who you was with.

Why.

And what was the mission.

More than where you came from.

Photo : Anton Khmarun

#urbanhistory
#japangraffiti
#tokyohistory
#archives by @dextamega

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3

2 months ago

2017
Trinidad.

I came back after forty years, and nothing matched my memory.

The answer came quickly.

A lot.
Almost everything.

Roads were different.
Entire forests I remembered were gone.

Not a few trees.
Whole landscapes that lived in memory.

What surprised me most were the shopping complexes.

Large American-style developments.

A huge gold-coloured building.

“What is that?”
“A shopping mall.”

Waaah.

Bigger than anything I remembered in Japan.
Maybe even America.

That first night I slept early.
I was anticipating morning.

When daylight came, I walked outside.

The road was asphalt now.
It used to be dirt.

Then something strange happened.

Inside my head was noise.
Not thoughts.
Noise.

Like radio static.
A receiver switching on.
A dial turning.
Searching.
Tuning.

Then it locked in.

The birds came first.
Then insects.
Then the breeze.
Then the village waking.

At first unfamiliar.
Then it all aligned.

Every sound belonged to every other sound.

Nothing competing.
Nothing out of place.

Coherence.

Tuned in.

#Trinidad
#MemoryAndPlace
#EnvironmentalChange
#Soundscape
#PersonalNarrative taken in Trinidad and Tobago by @dextamega

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2 months ago

2016 / 2017

Tokyo.

I had completed my home recording studio and started working on some ideas. Keeping things contained, controlled. Some interior installation projects kept the flow going.

Then an untimed call early one morning.

News of an untimely death. One of the foundational members of TPP had passed, and the reunion that followed brought everyone back into proximity again.

After that, a few things started to feel missing.

By mid-summer something really didn’t feel right. Not in the work. In me.

There was an urgency. No clear plan. Just a pull toward Trinidad.

It had been almost forty years since I had touched the soil of my birth or felt that sun and heat again. The heat was something I loved.

Forty years. An entire lifetime for some.

Why?

Part of it was identity. Part of it was alignment. Something I couldn’t properly name.

Maybe there was something waiting there for me. Something ancestral. Something unfinished.

At the same time, something new was forming in the Caribbean, particularly in Trinidad. A shift in sound. A different kind of dancehall. Raw, unsettled, not fully defined yet.

I wanted to be there to feel it, maybe understand it.

No structured plan, but intention was there.

Sometimes you don’t decide.

You respond.

So I went.

#japaneseunderground #caribbeandiaspora #identity #subculture #artistlife taken in Tokyo, Japan by @dextamega

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3

2 months ago

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3 months ago

Tokyo [ part 2 ]

At the same time, something else had started to surface.

Authenticity.

It had always been part of the conversation.

Even in the early days with MUR.
We fed off each other at times.

There were artists who would come to Tokyo,
get up quickly, document it,
and return home to build a narrative around it.

“Big in Japan.”

It wasn’t new.

Some local artists had done the same in reverse.

Positioning themselves inside something
they hadn’t really lived through at that level.

It happens.

But over time, I started to see it differently.

Not in terms of right or wrong.

More in terms of presence.

What does it mean to actually be part of something?

To stay with it.

To see it grow over years.

To be there when it’s quiet —
not just when it’s visible.

By that point, more than twenty years had passed.

Looking at it from where I was then,
it felt like MUR had already done what it needed to do.

The culture had been seeded.

What came after that was never going to be controlled.

And it shouldn’t be.

At the same time, I could feel things shifting internally.

Different perspectives.
Different directions.
Different ways of being present.

That felt natural.

Nothing stays fixed.

Especially something that started underground.

I wasn’t looking to correct anything.

Or claim anything.

Just observing how things move.

Over time.

#TokyoYears
#2013to2014
#StudioPractice
#dextamega
#UndergroundCulture taken in taishido setagaya-ku by @dextamega

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4 months ago

Tokyo [ part 1 ]

The shift.

Every story has a fault line.
Mine may have shifted in Kesennuma.

Not just in my work —
in how I saw everything around it.

I started to question what I was doing.

Why I was doing it.

What it meant to be “an artist” at all.

Around me, things were changing.

Friends who were artists were moving into different lanes.
Apparel. Products. Business.

It made sense.
They were building something sustainable.

I was in pause.

I wasn’t making enough from the work to say I was living from it.

So I had to question it.

Like calling yourself a surfer
when you haven’t been in the water for years.

Maybe it was rehabilitation.

There was something else too.

The way art gets labeled.

“The Japanese artist.”
“The Black artist.”
“The Asian artist.”

I never saw it like that.

In Japan, I had been accepted simply as an artist.

Outside of Japan, it felt different.

Like identity was being framed
before the work was even seen.

That didn’t sit well with me.

So I stepped away from that thinking.

I wasn’t interested in fitting a category.

Or pushing emotion.
Or presenting suffering.

I just wanted to make something that felt like beauty.

Even if it didn’t explain itself.

Even if it didn’t need to.

#TokyoYears
#ArtShift
#ProcessOverProduct
#AsemicThinking
#StudioPractice taken in taishido setagaya-ku by @dextamega

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4 months ago

Sangenjaya, 2013

The works I made in Oshima were more like studies than anything else.

I ended up giving most of them away.

By the spring of 2013 I returned to Tokyo.

Sangenjaya.

An area I had first lived in back in 1983. It had changed a lot. The road toward Shimokitazawa used to be flat earth. Now it felt like a different place.

I kept things simple.

I started practicing calligraphy again.
Then pushing it toward asemic writing.

It’s something I had been close to for a long time.

Like wildstyle graffiti — once you understand it, you can read it.

But with asemic writing, you can see it…
you just can’t read it.

It’s always something else.

I liked that.

I also started working with collage again.
Playing with digital tools.
Loose experiments. Psychedelic at times.

Nothing fixed.

Something had shifted though.

Not just in the work —
in how I was approaching it.

#Sangenjaya
#TokyoYears
#AsemicWriting
#CalligraphyPractice
#ArtShift taken in 三軒茶屋 Sangenjaya by @dextamega

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4 months ago

Oshima 2012

I stayed at the café, in the living quarters at the back.

It was cold.
The coldest I had felt since Shizuoka.

But the air kept me alert.
I liked it.

Sometimes I joined a volunteer group, helping to clean areas where plastics and debris still remained.

Simple work.

At night, at the café, I served drinks.
Hot sake.
Talking with people about the disaster, about survival, about whatever came up.

Life seemed to stand still.

In that rhythm, I started painting again.
MUR and 629 sent me supplies — materials, support, inspiration.

I made small pieces.
More basic than abstract.

As a youngster I had done life drawing — the kind where you move on from copying comics at school — but I never really showed that side of my work. I had moved into abstraction early and stayed there.

So I shifted.

Figure studies.
Female forms against synthesizers — something I had always liked.

Oil and acrylic, mixed with spray elements.

Nothing large.
Just working.

I was enjoying the scale.

Toward the end of 2011, going into 2012, we went to Sendai for an event. I did a live painting performance during the countdown.

There was that idea in the air at the time — some events had even been planned years before.

2012… the end of the world as we know it.

It had been circulating for years — in books, in conversations, in mostly western theories.

But standing there, painting, surrounded by people who had already lived through something that felt like the end of the world nine months earlier, on 3/11…

It didn’t feel dramatic.

It felt real.
Maybe more like a reset.

And if that was the case,
then it made sense to spend that moment doing something I understood.

Painting.

#Oshima2012
#Kesennuma
#Tohoku
#PaintingAgain
#JapanYears taken in Kesennuma by @dextamega

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4 months ago

South To North

That summer I left Japan for a while.

I went to London thinking maybe it was time to reconnect with the European art world. An old friend was running a gallery and we spoke about working together. The space had an independent spirit, but it didn’t feel like my lane. I spent my time drawing, visiting museums, cycling the city — but the disaster Japan was still going through stayed on my mind.

Hackney was just starting to move then — you could feel a new art scene forming, but I never found the groove that made me want to stay.

After about four months I went back to Japan.

When I returned, I didn’t go straight back into Tokyo. Instead I travelled south first.

Kyushu.

I wanted to visit places people in Japan call power spots — locations tied to older mythologies and natural, sometimes supernatural energy. I visited Takachiho, a place deeply connected to the Japanese creation story — where the sun goddess Amaterasu is said to have hidden herself in a cave before being lured back out.

Guided by a spiritualist friend, we visited those caves.

Mostly I moved slowly.

Seeing friends.
Taking part in small community art gatherings.
Trying to relax, trying to absorb — maybe even project — some calm.

After Kyushu I travelled north.

For the first time I went to Miyagi — the region hit hardest by the 3.11 disaster.

The destruction was still visible everywhere. Entire areas looked like time had stopped halfway through being rebuilt.

But the people felt different.

Strong.

Calm in a way that only comes after surviving something that big.

That energy stayed with me.

I wanted to remain close to it for a while.

That’s when I arrived on the island of Oshima in Kesennuma, visiting a friend who ran a small place called Voice Café.

Kesennuma Oshima.

#Kesennuma
#Tohoku
#Takachiho
#Japan
#ArtistJourney taken in Oshima, Kesennuma, Miyagi by @dextamega

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4 months ago

Embedded

After 3/11, something became clear.

While I had been drifting,
MUR hadn’t.

By 2011, MUR — now part of La Familia — was no longer just a graff crew. It had moved through layers. Walls were one thing. Networks were another.

In the days following the earthquake, reports surfaced of supply convoys reaching Tōhoku quickly — sometimes ahead of official channels.

During a call with one of the La Familia heads, we were speaking about the situation up north. I mentioned hearing about one of those convoys heading toward Miyagi.

He replied calmly,
“That’s handled.”

No explanation.
No detail.
No need.

That was when I understood what embedded influence really means in Japan.

Not aesthetic.
Not performance.

Infrastructure.

Years earlier, in 2006, I had tried to show this balance when I curated the FRANK 151 “Far East Conference” issue — placing an official gang member and a former police commissioner in the same publication.

It wasn’t about provocation.

It was about range.
About showing how different factions coexist without announcing themselves.

By 2011, I realized something else.

Movements that survive don’t shout.

They embed.
They wait.
They act when needed.

Quietly.

#SAYNOTHING
#MURJAPAN
#TokyoUnderground
#FRANK151
#Subculture

Photo 1 Hiroshi Nirei
Photo 2 Avgvst International taken in Tokyo, Japan by @dextamega

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5 months ago

2010–2011

I was still listening…
Spending time in Kichijoji.

A few small projects surfaced — a phone cover collaboration for Docomo, an appearance in a group show but, I wasn’t grounded. The underground graffiti, now labeled “street art,” had grown into something larger than any of us. It had a life of its own. Almost corporate.

I didn’t feel inside it anymore.

So I shifted direction again.

I called together a few musicians — post-celebrity status, seasoned, connected — and a fresh bass player I thought was cool. We started rehearsing quietly. No announcement. Just energy.

Rumors travel fast in Tokyo.

Soon people were asking,
“I heard you guys are setting up a new band?”

It felt alive.
We had reach.
We had experience.
We had the network to make it solid.

For a moment, it felt like movement again.

Then March 11, 2011 — 2:46 pm.

A magnitude 9 earthquake struck the northeast coast of Japan.
The ground moved for six minutes — but it felt longer.

The country went quiet.

Everything shifted.

Ambition felt misplaced.
Plans felt irrelevant.

The band met once more after that.

We couldn’t proceed.

Not because we lacked drive —

but because urgency had changed.

When a nation is recalibrating itself,
you don’t launch projects.

You listen.
You respond.
You try to adjust.

#March11
#2011Japan
#TokyoArchive
#Kichijoji
#SubcultureArchive taken in Tokyo, Japan by @dextamega

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5 months ago