(Daily Yomiuri-October 2003)

Soyak's art covers here, there and everywhere
Annabel Wright Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Filiz Emma Soyak refuses to fit neatly into any of the categories some may be tempted to apply to her. Born in Belgium to a Turkish father and Swedish mother, raised partly in Japan and currently a resident of North Carolina, she embodies a new breed of artist whose influences, although specific, are global.

"When people ask me, 'Oh, where are you from?' I usually give them a short version," Soyak, 23, said in an interview with The Daily Yomiuri. "I feel like I have a mixture of everything. I don't feel typically Swedish. I don't feel typically Turkish...And then I grew up here in Japan."
This mosaic background has given her more than just a smattering of three or four languages and the enviable opportunity to travel the world at a relatively young age--it has also provided her with creative material and a means of looking at the world based on the notion of cultural give and take.

The paintings in Soyak's current exhibition, Striving to be Conscious, which is being shown as part of Swedish Style Tokyo 2003, embody the artist's multicultural background and emphasize the role Japan and the Japanese love of tradition continue to play in her work and her life.
Although Soyak's art is principally abstract, her paintings are clearly Japan-influenced, often incorporating elements such as kanji and washi paper and traditional images such as wagasa paper umbrellas and kabuki. Among the most striking of these is Aka, in which the red eyes, red pouted lips and blood-red robe of a kabuki actor stand out in vivid contrast to his chalky face and black hair.

Soyak makes similar exuberant use of color to create mood in all her works, layering on her paints and scratching at the surface of her canvases to give them a murky and sometimes jeweled depth that glows in the dim confines of the exhibition space.
"I've always been influenced with color, so color is always prominent in my work. I'm a very emotional painter," she said. "I think the reason I love to paint is because it's an emotional outlet for me."

Perhaps because of this approach, the exhibition as a whole conveys the enthusiasm that characterizes Soyak's art and her eagerness to reach a broad audience. This is also one of the reasons she chose Gallery ef, a former warehouse built in 1868, despite its relatively out-of the-way location in Asakusa.
"I like alternative spaces because that way you can really get accidental viewers," Soyak said. "And yeah, it's not an art gallery district, but the point of this show is not 'Art Gallery.' I didn't want it in a regular, plain white gallery. I wanted it to be immersed in the culture, because that's sort of my message--to appreciate little things."

On occasion, Soyak's eagerness to engage the viewer verges on heavy-handedness: Chu, a work composed around a kanji character used in a combination expressing "combining elements," is less effective at conveying the principle of balance and interconnectedness behind her art than other pieces that make more subtle use of washi paper and Japanese printed materials.

But most of the canvases are less direct and demand more from the viewer in terms of imaginative interpretation. One of these, Shinjuku Static, a frenetic, abstract composition of brightly colored blocks at abrupt intersections, will be instantly familiar to viewers living in Tokyo.