About

Alan Nakagawa, Sound & Inter-Disciplinary Artist

WEBSITE: www.alannakagawa.com

Instagram: nakagawa2015

Based in Los Angeles CA USA

Alan Nakagawa (1964 b.) 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 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).

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.

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. He is currently developing a sound portrait of artist Isamu Noguchi and is creating an inter-disciplinary archive of St Louis’ underground dance bar Upstairs Lounge (1994-2018) for the 2026 Counterpublic Coyote Time with co-curator Nora Khan.

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).