Licsi = Lychee
The journey of Brooklyn-based artist by way of Hungary, Lichiban is not one of brevity. It is one of depth and mystery. We recently caught up with Licsi to rap about past, present and future and left feeling inspired, united and sexy. Read on as we talk about everything from material selections to Arabic mysticism, sexuality in western society to Dam Funk, Onra, Melo-X and beyond.
Location: Lichiban’s Brooklyn, New York Studio, 85 Degrees and sticky whilst sipping on Lichi’s homemade banana smoothie.
One of the things I was wondering, when I was looking at your art was what is your medium? I notice you like to paint a lot on wood, I mean I know you started drawing first but what is your preferred method?
The canvas that I use is wood most of the time, although now I’m trying to translate my style into bigger pieces to do murals. What I like about wood is that it has its own texture, which is already a layer you know what I mean? I am not inspired by white canvas or white paper. But I have to find ways to work with it since I’m going to have to paint on it.
So you like wood? It doesn’t seem like it would be very expensive - you just get scraps?
See that’s the things. All of those little pieces [that Lichi paints on and points to] those are not pieces to be sold - those are my sketchbook. Actually that’s how I found wood. I was going on a stroll to the bookstore and it had this bag of random pieces of wood so I was like “how much is that ? 5 bucks? I’ll take it!”
[break to chat with Lichi’s intern, Rob, who was editing the latest DJ Kiva interview video for Lichiban.blogspot.com]
[birds chirping loudly]
I love it, all of it [pointing at her various sketches, image clippings and overall creative nook].
Yeah! This is my vision board - I created it partly with a clear intention in my mind about what I’d like to achieve in the near future, and partly just for visual inspiration…when I was looking at it a few months later, all the symbols and references I put up there started to spell out a story I was living…it actually worked! I was like oh my god - you know - things started to make sense, like symbolically things started to make sense!
So, I was doing a little research and just looking at your stuff it seems like you are very spiritual which I appreciate and think is really important and I wondered have you always been a spiritual person?
So much to say about that! – I’ll try to keep it short. I grew up in a communist country where religion was not something that was encouraged so I didn’t have any specific religious background to grow up with. I really loved children’s books, especially folk tales and mythology, and I kind of started to collect them. I love stories I love mythology so I started to connect the pieces and started to compare the mythological themes, got sucked into that completely. Just as I was getting into more serious spiritual writings, my country went through a huge political change (basically ended communism and had its first election). The country opened up and finally we were able to access religious texts. Everyone jumped on Asian religions, somehow that was the stuff we were starting to connect with. Suddenly there were translations of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavadgita, the Upanishads, Tibetan Buddhist writings and I was just eating it up.
How old were you?
I was like 13/14.
[Shows me some images in a n old sketchbook she kept from the past that don’t get brought out often].
Alchemy was one of my inspirations. That was basically my art – it was a representation of that spiritual search. I was also really inspired by Tibetan Buddhism, tantric art, and all the symbolism and then after high school I found this private art school that was teaching the esoteric symbolism of traditional art. I had a strange experience, the teacher was not really a spiritual model I was looking for-he was kind of a celebrity hunter. It just wasn’t very inspiring and I just figured, you know, that modern art was about the ego. It’s not about representing a concept that is bigger than yourself, but all about the ego. That was a big turn off for me. Also, I was a loner in high school. Spent a lot of time digging up artist biographies of Dali, Bunuel, Max Ernst, Hieronymus Bosch to learn about what it takes to be an artist. I learned all of what I know about art outside of school. I went in deep, my art was a kind of soul searching and healing. I lived alone since I was 17 and would go home and meditate, which ended up leading me to a mystical experience, or what I thought of a mystical experience was. I was trying to find how to express what I had experienced and kind of put it in context.
Mystical huh? (collab piece with Quan Luv ->)
Yeah so I left Hungary and moved to Boston when I was 20 and I found Sufism. I found Persian & Arabic mysticism, a mystical path centered around love, to be something that was the closest in expression to what I experienced at 17. So I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do with my life, so the choice between being an artist (which is what I always wanted to be) and doing a career that pays the bill came up. Frankly, I didn’t have any role model in my family that was an artist. My dad was an artist at ♥, but not in practice so always thought I have to have a career and do my art on the side as opposed to do my art full time and try to make a living off it. I tried to get an education, so I wouldn’t be stuck in doing underpaid work. It was kind of amazing to be in this country and see that I can pursue something like Persian mysticism. I could learn languages and do research and not have to sort of parrot back some teachers, professors – which is what was going on in my country it was still coming out of this very authoritarian educational system. So, I spent my education on pursuing that – I thought I was going to be a teacher or a professor having to spend my life reading and translating mystical texts and get paid to travel and meet Sufis. I wasn’t doing art. I was doing drawings here and there as gifts and kept it going but I wasn’t really doing art. And that got to me eventually. After a few years it really got to me and manifested itself physically – I got panic attacks and I was convinced that I’m going to die.
I’m normally not a stressed-out person, but the problem was that I was repressing all of that stuff- I wanted to do art, but I was already on a different path. I felt really trapped in my life. I developed all of these ailments you know what I mean? That’s a huge warning sign that you need to change- that you need to find what you want to do and do it. So I went to a healer and so she helped me. And she was like “you’ve been going around in circles all your life. You really have to do what you love to do, it’s in your face. What is it, say it?” And I’m like “art.” And she said “yes, just go for it – You’re gonna do well.”
That was the last straw. That was before I left school. I got research money to go to the Himalayas and find the Sufis that drew me in the first place to study Persian mysticism… this very little-known group in Kashmir that had a color mysticism very unique to the region. (http://lichiban.blogspot.com/2009/07/inner-visions.html). So, like the art was kind of in there. It seemed to be a mixture of Persian love mysticism and Tibetan Buddhist tantric visualization exercises. Interestingly a month before I applied for the grant, I had this crazy experience…I had a vision where I was told “you gotta go there – work on yourself and make the changes necessary.” So that was kind of a kick in the ass – because I was wasting some time doing grad school while I wasn’t happy at all. Went to Kashmir and met these two spiritual leaders that really just changed my life in some sort of a deep, unspoken ways – with their presence, with their energy. I came back and said “life changes, I’m moving to NY, be the artist – I’m gonna leave this but I can still bring the spirituality into my work you know and be true to who I am.” So that was a big step. I spent like a year preparing to come to NY, working on developing my style and finding a language of expression.
A lot of your work is very sexual/sensual. Do you feel that is a reflection of who you are? Or maybe the better question is how do you feel about expressing sexuality whether art or in-person?
I think that the creative force is source energy. It’s the same energy that is fueling our libido. So I think that sexual energy is creative energy. Artists tend to be hypersexual and you know if you’re successful at harnessing it and putting it into your work then it can really be the fuel – if you’re channeling it that way. As far as expression of sexuality, I haven’t even done anything close to what I would like to do. I’m actually preparing an erotic series after I’ve launched the BODDHI project. It’s not that obvious to do erotic art for a female artist you know. Your work has its own life, its own independent existence but when you come back to it and people look at it and trying to draw conclusions about you based on your work. So you lose a sense of privacy. For example, one of the questions I think about…I’m doing a lot of work for kids and a lot of work for adults. How do I separate it so one doesn’t bother the other? One of my inspirations was this illustration that I discovered in my mothers closet hidden away at 12.
Mom’s are sneaky like that.
Heheh yeah it was this Arabic sex manual from the middle ages-it was a translation. It was beautiful with hand drawn images. Very very tasty, very very sensual. So I kind of – when I’m really ready to come out with it – that is kind of the direction I’ll want to go.
So this isn’t even the beginning?
[Pointing as a sexy human feline morph]
Yeah. Sometimes people look at it and they are like who is this? They try to psychoanalyze you. Sexuality is a huge inspiration. It’s a very strong presence in my life as far as um…how should I put that? I don’t know how to explain it - but I want to represent a strong feminine sexuality that is empowering, liberating and playful.
Good – we need more voices like that. It’s not like overtly in your face its just like…
I feel that there is a huge problem about sexuality in this society and of course if I travel around it gets worse.
You can trace the way female sexuality is treated in most cultures: it has always been seen as a very powerful and a very intimidating force. You see it in certain cultures – they try to control it, oppress it. In our society, I think it’s as free as is gets in human terms. My point is that there is a lot of healing that needs to be done as far as how we think about sexuality. How we think about female and male. I’m a feminist, but I’m not militant about the history of women. I’m not about talking about how women were victimized. I’m aware of it – I’ve studied history and I’ve traveled around. I know how women are and have been treated throughout history. But I’m more about healing, balancing and what’s next - not being caught in the past. I’m more interested in questions about what can we do now to heal both men and women? To find our inner divinity instead of keep on saying we were oppressed, because that way you give energy to the oppressing force. Both oppressor and oppressed need healing. Because when you hurt someone, you hurt yourself. And I also believe that both men and women are equally capable of being oppressors, so it has to be an internal work for both sexes. When we try reconnecting with nature and our spirituality that is connected with the earth, that’s where a lot of female wisdom and female energy comes in and starts to heal and bring back that vibration. That’s a universal non-denominational message– that to me is the new feminine voice. The power of the mother is coming in and bringing this sort of earth energy. Sexuality has to be liberated and taken away from this perception of being this intimidating power. One thing that I learned from the Sufis that I studied with was that for most people making love is the closest you get to the experience of divine union, of dissolving the self, of really uniting with another soul and experiencing that kind of unity. So when you think about it that way you bring back the sacredness of sex and sexuality. Our body is a temple!
You mentioned you tried to separate your work with and adults and kids. What kind of work do you do with kids?
Yeah I am a working artist. I work with an organization called Voices of New York and we mentor kids. Also a lot of my new work (The Boddhi – the cat shaman) is going to be oriented towards kids. So if I want to bring traffic and visibility I’m like oh my god what am I going to do with the naked samurai women? Hahhahha
How old are the kids you work with?
Anywhere between 3 to 14. We’re actually in the building stages of our programs. We just had a workshop that was sponsored by an architectural firm Real Estate Arts. We are trying to make kids get involved in the green movement– to teach them that being cool is being good to the environment. We had the kids re-build an imaginary sustainable Empire State building in the future. It was amazing what brilliant solutions the kids came up with.
Kids ask the funniest questions – what kind of stuff do they say to you? Are they pretty open?
I had some kids asking for stencils so they could bomb the city (no worries I’m not getting anyone into trouble). One of the kids at the workshop, Quest, immediately recognized my snowleopard yogi, Dorje as a Buddhist inspired figure. click for visual. They actually really get into the cats – they love my cats, that is my test of being able to connect with kids and that I’m still in touch with my inner child. .
Wow! So what are you working on soon?
I am working on an anniversary mixtape for my blog. There’s going to be Mars and Venus edition. I’m gonna drop the Mars edition first and its gonna have people like Dam-Funk, Machinedrum, Johnny Voltik, Waajeed, Ruckazoid, Jesse Boykins III, Zackey Force Funk, a dope poet called Kesed, Computer Jay, these 2 French producers Onra and Walter Mecca and many more. My man, Melo-X is doing the mixing…so you know it’s gonna be hot! I listen to my cat sisters, Sarah White, Diamond Zoidal, Raye 6 and Chesca from London a lot – she’s like the boogie queen of England.
What are you looking forward to?
I’m going to have a show at the end of July at this loft gallery called “Lotus Temple of Visions” and I’m teaming up with the Space Age Herbalist, Divine Elohim who is going to be the voice for Boddhi. Boddhi is going to be a platform for collaboration with a lot of my artist friends. So my friend, producer Mike Genato is going to be the sound engineer for the BODDHI theme song for instance. My girl, another dope producer Enki is going to do some tracks. We’re going to do some stop motion animation as well…the list is long. I’m also really looking forward to this music video we just shot with my friends’ band MY M.O, where I play a Himalayan shamaness.
Last year was hard. A lot of New Yorker’s including myself, just a lot of hard work. Not so much fruits of our labors. But this year – the flood gate is open. The recession and all of this expectation of this shift is really bringing out the best in everybody. It’s beautiful, really beautiful.
-J. Schneider for T.M.C
