One Eye Heads: E’wao Kagoshima’s Mutants in the City

Grids of mostly one-eyed monsters in blue pen stare out from the pages of the drawings in E’wao Kagoshima’s multi-sheet work One Eye Heads. A few smile sweetly, apparently friendly; others offer a placid countenance; many leer menacingly. Each is different from its neighbors, distinguished by a vast array of hairstyles, headgear, facial hair, and more. Created in 1982, Kagoshima’s set of ten drawings in blue ballpoint pen on legal-sized paper includes several hundred faces the artist describes as “monsters.” These repeat and evolve throughout Kagoshima’s work, appearing in diptych paintings from the 1980s and ’90s, and even in work from recent years. The heads in these drawings are assembled into a mutant crowd—an emblem of the fractured yet vibrant pluralism of early 1980s New York City. Drawing from a lineage of Pop and comic art as well as the artist’s occasional observations of everyday life, the heads visualize what artist and critic Nicolas Moufarrege called “The Mutant International”: a postmodern subjectivity made up of hybrid influences and unstable identities. Rather than escapist fantasy, Kagoshima’s drawings reflect the representational possibilities and psychic intensities of a moment when the boundaries of culture and identity were being radically redrawn.

The series emerged as a way for the artist to challenge himself. Kagoshima worked with a ballpoint pen because of its permanence, noting that, in pen “you can’t repair a mistake; you have to keep going.”¹ He sought to fill each page in the span of a single day, creating grid after grid of cyclopian faces. Ever frugal, he first made the drawings on the back of dense typewritten documents his wife Sachiko brought home from her job with a Japanese-language newspaper. This invisible presence on the verso symmetrically suggests that the heads are Kagoshima’s own pseudo-linguistic form (indeed several of the faces incorporate Japanese characters). Their most common feature is their singular eye, though even this rule is broken on several occasions. Kagoshima remarked that he thought that “with two eyes [the face] is too busy, so they have one eye only.”² Beyond this trait, however, the heads have little else in common. A kaleidoscope of wrinkles, scars, tattoos, and earrings make each face distinct in the crowd. In this they reflect the artist’s periodic practice of working outdoors: while he recounts mostly making these works at home, he also took to the streets of Chinatown and other downtown neighborhoods, as a way to focus on the act of drawing. Skewing toward stylization and illustration, they still hold elements of his lived experiences, including perhaps the quintessential image of New York crowds.

While Kagoshima calls the heads in his drawings “monsters,” Moufarrege offered a different, and resonant, term for them: mutants. In a three-part essay published serially across three 1983 issues of Arts Magazine, Moufarrege unfolded a lengthy manifesto, titled “The Mutant International.”³ His essay attempts to identify a strain of post-pop surrealism, one that would reflect the interplay of diasporic influence and high and low culture. Drawing up a constellation of artists working in New York at the time, Moufarrege situates Kagoshima among well-known figures (David Wojnarowicz, Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring), those known to insiders (Jim Nutt and Alexis Smith), and others whose names might be less familiar (Hervé Di Rosa, François Boisrond, Chuck Nanney).⁴ Today the essay read as an idiosyncratic take on the role of difference (whether of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality) in the art of the 1980s. Moufarrege evokes diaspora as a fundamental influence upon many of the artists (if not necessarily a shared condition): “The International is a nomadic wanderer, on land and in mind. … Everywhere and lots of places are home.”⁵ The manifesto addresses this “nomadic” condition in a breathless and hallucinatory style equal to its subject with, as Moufarrege notes, “tension on the borders as we prepare for total planetary and self-extinction,” and exhorts the spirit of that “mutant existentialist whose imagination is [made of] concentrated and collected racial/cultural experience.”⁶ Situating himself within this international assembly, Moufarrege recalls his own itinerant history, suggesting that diasporic imagination certainly has a part to play in his formulation of the artistic crosscurrents of New York in the early 1980s.⁷ The Mutant of that moment is, for Moufarrege, the result of an altered genetic sequence, of mixing and twisting, multiplication and miscegenation. He writes:

The International is spirit, sponge, and mirror. The artist, incorporating elements from the near and distant past, the present, and an ambitious future. Mutagenic changes, chromosomes adrift in a plasma of color. Personal, social, political, and fantastic commentary blends East and West, the Sheikh of Araby, Coca Cola, the Eiffel Tower, and Mount Fuji. Edgar Allan Poe meets Alice in Wonderland. Gertrude Stein is in my collection; Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and a lot of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko comics.⁸

“Mutagenic change” seems an apt analogy for Kagoshima’s crowd. Some draw upon recognizable archetypes—a Mohawk-coiffed punk, a fedora-wearing hard-boiled detective—while others portray all manner of human-animal-demon hybrid. Kagoshima has also suggested a specific Japanese monster forebear known as hitotsume-kozō, or “one-eyed boy monk.”⁹ Found throughout the Japanese archipelago, the origin and meaning of the hitotsume-kozō is contested, but the frightening figure remains a widespread and familiar part of contemporary folklore.¹⁰ These drawings developed from a process of repetition and difference, with Kagoshima working within a framework to develop as many variations as possible. The blend of “Eiffel Tower and Mount Fuji” suggests the fusion of the natural world, and the monumentally human-made. However, in these sheets Kagoshima also gestures to the potency of New Yorkers’ self-fashioning, humorously redrawn as monsters from Japanese folk tradition. The invocation of comic artists Jack Kirby (co-creator of Captain America, the Fantastic Four, among others), and Steve Ditko (creator of Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange, among others), is also fitting. Though Kagoshima did not create the drawings with the intention to show them (he was also creating paintings in the same period), he has recently said that he may have worked on legal-sized paper in order to Xerox them and sell them on the street as zines.¹¹

Many of the artists that Moufarrege mentions were based in New York at the time of writing, yet the city itself falls away in the essay. The conditions of the austerity-shocked city are scarcely discussed as a shared context for much of the Mutant International’s production. New York circa 1982 was home to a vast range of aesthetic possibilities. The rise of alternative spaces, including collectives and artist-run galleries, created new artistic venues (often in the shells left behind by deindustrialization and white flight). From Fashion Moda in the Bronx to the East Village’s Club 57 and Linda Goode Bryant’s Just Above Midtown, alternative spaces actively built community for voices outside of the white-masculine-centered scenes that ruled mid-century New York. At the same time, in another kind of boundary-crossing “mutation,” this period saw the rise of what Rosalind Krauss later termed the “post-medium condition”¹²: artists no longer identified themselves as painters, sculptors, photographers, or printmakers, but instead moved fluidly among media. Artist-run nonprofits like The Kitchen were equally home to minimalism, punk, and early hip-hop. Keith Haring, Gretchen Bender, and David Wojnarowicz all presented work at the Video Lounge at the nightclub, Danceteria. Kagoshima himself showed work at the New Museum and at the Asian American Art Centre, two institutions with distinct missions that emerged in this blossoming of alternative spaces in the 1970s and 1980s.

In this context, Kagoshima’s monsters can be read as mutants in the hybrid city. They reflect back the era’s porous tribalism, a moment that included a seemingly limitless multiplicity of styles and influences. As in the programmatic ethos of New York’s alternative spaces, the heads are presented without hierarchy.¹³ Tellingly Kagoshima’s drawings are occasionally masculine or feminine but ultimately without legible race or gender. One head features a flat top with a few vertical lines that harks back to the monster Frankenstein, bearing across its face the word “GŌTH.” The bar over the “Ō” becomes an eyebrow for the singular eye. While many are punk or punk-adjacent (vaguely identifiable by piercings or facial tattoos), others might be club kids waiting for entry to the Mudd Club, or members of the crowd at a Greer Lankton opening at Civilian Warfare. While Kagoshima’s own account of the drawings is that most of them were created at home, the details of some individual heads surely take inspiration from the streets and his encounters with the city’s art scene. He insists that his poor command of English left him outside of the art world, yet he followed cultural events through arts coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere, and even arrived in the city with an awareness of the East Village scene.¹⁴ Moreover, while he may have worked in relative isolation, when asked about his relationship to specific artists (especially fellow Japanese artists), he often replies with quick recall of New York exhibitions and venues in which their work was featured.¹⁵ Thus although his work may not have developed in close conversation with other artists, he was no stranger to the many spaces that made up the downtown scene. What results from these observations and imaginative flights is an algorithmic mixing of 1980s typology—a bit of New Wave, a touch of No Wave, a dash of hip-hop. On the other side emerges something distinctly mutant. If his drawings might be understood as street or crowd scenes, as I’ve suggested here, they can also be read as indices of individual psychological fragmentation, the dream of vast transformation and self-fashioning in art and in life. Amid the production line of repeating varied One Eyed-Monsters lies two opposing forces: the pressures of coherent selfhood and the radiant possibility of postmodern life. In this chorus of style and excess is a space in which the grid barely holds the city’s contradictions.

^NOTES

¹ Conversation with the artist, translated by Reiko Tomii, July 15, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Kagoshima believes that his work came to Moufarrege’s attention through his wife, who actively promoted her husband’s work among writers and critics she encountered in periodicals and newspapers. Ibid.
⁴ The inclusion of some European, particularly French, artists may reflect Moufarrege’s Parisian upbringing and connections.
⁵ Nicolas A. Moufarrege, “The Mutant International: vision invasion in varying landscapes defines the need for integral survival,” Arts, September 1983, 120.
⁶ Moufarrege, “The Mutant International,” 120.
⁷ Moufarrege was born in Egypt to Christian Lebanese parents and raised across Beirut and Paris before moving to New York in 1981. Arthur Lubow, “Nicolas Moufarrege Was a Student of Art History. This Work Shows It.” New York Times, February 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/arts/design/Nicolas-Moufarrege-Queens-Museum.html.
⁸ Moufarrege, “The Mutant International,” 120.
⁹ As told to the author, based on Kagoshima’s conversations with Reiko Tomii.
¹⁰ Michael Dylan Foster, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 145–47.
¹¹ Conversation with the artist, translated by Reiko Tomii, July 15, 2025.
¹² Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 30–32.
¹³ This is not to say that no hierarchy existed during this period. Despite Moufarrege’s dream of the post-identity Mutant International, New York’s art scene remained segregated along lines of race and gender. See for example Lorraine O’Grady’s account of her 1983 Black and White Show at Kenkeleba Gallery in Lorraine O’Grady, “The Black and White Show,” Artforum, May 2009, 190–96.
¹⁴ Conversation with the artist, translated by Reiko Tomii, July 15, 2025.
¹⁵ In speaking to Kagoshima, I asked about various New York artists working in the 1980s to try to understand where he saw himself, and with whom he was in conversation. Kagoshima insists that he worked largely in isolation due to the substantial language barrier. However, when asked for example about his Japanese contemporary Kazuko Miyamoto (who moved to the city in 1962), Kagoshima immediately recollected the exhibitions she had staged at A.I.R. Gallery and elsewhere. It seems that while he may not have been friendly or collegial with many other artists, he certainly saw exhibitions, and followed arts media coverage. Conversation with the artist, translated by Reiko Tomii, July 15, 2025.

Brandon Eng is a curator and writer based in Minneapolis, where he is Curatorial Assistant for Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. He is interested in interdisciplinary practices across moving image, performance, sound, and music, and diasporic histories in the Americas. Eng has worked on the Walker’s exhibitions dedicated to Pan Daijing, Dyani White Hawk, and Christine Sun Kim, and curated the exhibition Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy (2025–26). He also works on the museum’s permanent collection and has made acquisitions of work by Park McArthur and Olga Balema, among others. Previously he was Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Media and Performance, where he contributed writing to the exhibition catalogs Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2021) and Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023). He holds a BA in art history from Wesleyan University and an MPhil from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.