Saijo was born and raised in Los Angeles, and was influenced by media culture (books, television, movies, magazines). Saijo takes the approach of “open text” which takes an object, such as a book, transforms the material from sequential to spatial order, and opens up a space to create new meaning. His unconventional process often involves Xerox copy technology, office supplies, and building materials to construct art with a wide range of subject matter from mid-century modern architecture, WWII photos, cinema stills, imaginary landscapes, and the history of fashion. Saijo rejects the notion of art as a fixed idea defined by history, and instead he reclaims history, and redefines it based on “human experience”. His work takes the form of installation, drawing, sculpture, and mixed media. Saijo refers to the notion of “memory construction” as an entry point to understanding his complex body of work. Memory consists of a combination of feeling, words and image which shape our perception of reality. As a youth Saijo spent much of his time sailing with his father off the coast of Southern California. Such memories have manifested in his recent work which explores themes of loss, entropy, transformation, and the unconscious: represented by an oceanscape where the boundaries are blurred between the sky and the sea. Mythology and classic tales, like Homer’s Odyssey and Stories of the Seven Seas, are reduced to abstraction, thus leaving the viewer to weave their own meaning into the work, navigating through a personal dreamscape, and continuing on a journey between the familiar and the unknown. (Bleicher Golightly)Mike Saijo was born in 1974, he attended Pasadena Art Center College of Design, and grew up in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles. He started out looking at many books and magazines and later influenced by graffiti art and Oshuji-Japanese calligraphy. After high school he made his first ‘book piece’ using pages of the New Testament bible, and printing an image of Senator Daniel Innoye he found from a history book and began to make art about ‘making history‘. Influenced by the tradition of ancient manuscripts, he copies information using a xerox copy machine onto old discolored pages of books creating a sense of the old, while venturing into the new. He maps out territories of knowledge from a wide range of resources and reworks them to operate on its own terms. For him it is an attempt to take ownership of the past, and effect how we see our present historical situation as we enter into moment of accelerated change and may experience memory loss. He has exhibited at MOCA, and in the permanent collection at the Orange County Museum of Agriculture and Nikkei History at Cal State Fullerton, as well as University of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand. (MOPLA)Mike Saijo explores the notions of “representation and history” by forming constructions and site-specific installations—with the text of actual book pages juxtaposing imagery of historical incidents and events which have had significant local impact. Together, image and text undergo a process of reduction and abstraction, combining to articulate the point that “now” is as much “history” as history is now.The art-making process involves deconstruction, appropriation, and re-contextualization of text and image. Mike is interested in the continual process of decomposition of meanings which do not correspond to conventional, constructed “reality”, but at the same time create new meaning. His artistic choices are made through a combination of research, hypothesizing, and personal ethics guided by a certain intuitive logic where conventional thought may not apply. (Lens Scratch)Mike Saijo uses an innovative process applying Xerox technology and pages from discarded books to create what can be viewed as post-modern conceptual painting. He juxtaposes textual fields with imagery of personal and historical significance often selected by an intuitive process. Saijo explores the notions of “distant reading” by manipulating the book from a sequential order to a spatial order and opens up the possibilities of interpretation. His constructions are derived from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of ’colloquial language’ that every sense can be expressed without having an idea how what each word means just as one speaks without knowing how single sounds are produced