About

Alan Nakagawa, Sound & Inter-Disciplinary Artist

CONTACT: invisibleteahouse @ gmail . com

WEBSITE: www.alannakagawa.com

Instagram: nakagawa2015

Based in Los Angeles CA USA

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories. He has created a series of Invisible Architecture experiences that are mash ups of the recorded acoustics of historical sites, giving new context to historic places through a contemporary lens of sound. Nakagawa is currently the Artist-in-residence for two institutions. 1) Kaya Press at the University of Southern California, a small literary publication focusing on Asian and Pacific Islander American and Diasporic literature celebrating its 30th Anniversary and 2) the Gerth Archives, California State University Dominguez Hills assigned to the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations collections, which consists of materials pertaining to the campaign that led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. His first book, “A.I.R.Head: Anatomy of an Artist in Residence” was published in January 2023 by Writ-Large Press. It maps his artistic trajectory that led to his nine Artist-in-residencies in six years.

Nakagawa is currently working on a sound portrait of Japanese- American Artist Isamu Noguchi which will consist of field recordings of sites along the Pacific Rim integral to Noguchi’s history including the Newborn Section of the Los Angeles General Hospital where the seminal Modernist was born in the begining of the 1900’s.

Nakagawa has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors; Peace Resonance; Hiroshima/Wendover combines recordings of the interiors of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah); Conical Sound; Antoni Gaudi and Simon Rodia combines recordings of the interiors of Watts Towers (Los Angeles) and the Sagrada Familia (Barcelona, Spain). 

He was the first artist in resident for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the Los Angeles County Library. Nakagawa was invited by the Smithsonian Museum of American History to research the development of the hearing aid in the US. He currently resides in Los Angeles’ Koreatown and continues to exhibit and develop his creative practice.

Nakagawa is a recipient of two Art Matters grants, City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship, California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship and a Monbusho Scholar. He co-founded arts collective non-profit Collage Ensemble Inc. (1984-2011), curated experimental music weekly Ear Meal Webcast (2010-2017), produced public practice artist interviews podcast VISITINGS Radio Show (2017-2020) and administers the website Asian American Futurism (2022-Present).