Audio By Carbonatix
Don Ed Hardy has dragons under his skin. The indelible kind, all over his body. But the Bay Area painter, probably best known for his 34-year catalogue of works as a groundbreaking tattoo artist, has now — in the tradition of the great narrative scroll painters of Asia — committed 2,000 of the mythological beasts to a roll of paper four feet high and 500 feet long. The work, a walk-through installation that must change configuration to conform to each venue exhibiting it, travels to Denver this week, where it will remain on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver in Sakura Square through the summer.
The idea hatched in 1976 — a dragon year, according to the Asian zodiac — when Hardy, a lifelong aficionado of Asian art and culture, did some math and realized the next dragon year would also be the millennial year.
“I thought it would be amazing to do an artwork with 2,000 dragons in it,” Hardy says, and that’s just what he did. After finding a manufacturer of lengthy scrolls, on New Year’s Day 2000 he began a seven-month odyssey across the paper expanse, using a special roll-through easel that exposed only a few feet of surface at a time. He numbered each dragon meticulously with Chinese numerals, and working for the most part without preliminary sketches (a skill understandably honed by handling a tattoo needle), Hardy created a splashy, abstract yet detailed work galvanized by mythological reference. But there’s nothing to fear from these creatures, who have little in common with those evil, fire-breathing Western dragons looming around medieval castles.
“Forms of dragons have appeared on pottery or were carved into stone in China for thousands of years,” Hardy explains. “A fusion of various creatures in the actual world, these dragons possess magical qualities — in particular, those associated with water. In Asian culture, they’re considered primary forces of nature. Their implications are positive and transformative.”
