Yumi Sakugawa

Yumi Sakugawa is a comic artist based in California, USA.

Quotes

What if instead of drowning in your self- hating thoughts, you spread them apart like cotton candy...
- beginning of the comic "Tearing Feelings Apart", in (Don't) Call Me Crazy edited by Kelly Jensen (2018)

How can we possibly feel oneness with the universe, if we aren't creating any inner space to really listen to what the universe is trying to tell us?

Let us get reacquainted with the miracle that is your breath: all the trees, flowers, and plants on this earth make it possible for you to breathe. All living things on this earth are breathing in and breathing out the same air that you are.

There are no divisions in the universe, the universe is oneness, the universe just is

when we realize and truly embrace everything the is within us...that is when we can truly feel healed and whole again

I think it’s this intention to pay attention to what you’re doing in your day-to-day life to take care of your home and body and health and really taking — not taking pride, but like how Marie Kondo says to thank your clothes when you’re giving them away, that spirit. I just like the idea of honoring these very mundane activities, whether it’s washing your dishes or decorating your office; because I think when you put care and intention into these activities, it infuses everything you do with this mindful sense of care, where things just feel more meaningful because you’re doing them for yourself. (2017)

When you feel like you have autonomy in everything in your life — what outfit you want to wear, or what flowers you want to buy for yourself, or what color area rug you want to put in your home — I feel like when you exercise making these choices for yourself, you just have more ownership of your life; and when you have more ownership of your life, you just make bolder choices for yourself that are going to improve the quality of your life in this really wonderful and intuitive way. I think when it comes down to it I want people to have joyful autonomy. (2017)

I feel like being a second-generation person of color born to immigrant parents, I really do think that sort of — however subconsciously — [does] play into my creative perspective on juggling dual realities, barriers in connecting with other people, just sort of having dual perspectives on reality. (2014)

A lot of people ask me — I get this all the time — 'Are you Buddhist? Are you Zen?' And my answer is always, 'I don't always necessarily identify myself with Buddhism, but the philosophy is something I'm always interested in and am very curious about learning more about.' So I am very influenced by Buddhist philosophies, Buddhist schools of thought. So much of it deals with being mindful, being fully aware of just a very subjective nature of reality, the illusion of reality, sort of the dichotomy of samsara or nirvana ... those are things that I do think about a lot, and I think it definitely, that interest reflects itself in the comics. (2014)

With comics, it’s always this interesting tug of war between what you can convey with words that can’t be conveyed with just image, and what you can convey with image that words can’t do justice to. So it’s always a combination of both when I come up with the stories because the two things are inseparable to me.

That way of visualizing emotions, I feel like that came from that book I read that helped me meditate, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle...And one thing he emphasizes over and over, which is also something that’s explored a lot in Buddhist philosophy, is that your true essence is completely separate from your thought process. So whatever verbal chatter is in your mind, you can be immersed in it, or you can actually see it as a third-person observer and sort of step back from the chaos of your thoughts and just think to yourself, “Oh, that’s an interesting response I’m having,” or “Oh, how interesting that I’m going through that mental battle again. I’m triggered to think these thoughts again.” And it’s, of course, easier said than done, but I feel like making these comics is a way of reminding myself that if I’m feeling sad or if I’m feeling anxious, I’m not the sadness, I’m not the anxiousness. I can step back from this bad energy or see it as a rainstorm or a bad streak of weather that will eventually go away.

I never want my stories to be just sad or just happy. I always feel like the stories that I love, they’re never completely resolved. All the loose ends aren’t tied, but it’s that tension that makes me keep thinking about it. One ending that keeps coming to mind is the ending for Spirited Away, the Ghibli movie, where it’s a happy ending but also a sad ending, but there’s also this possibility of more things to come. I just feel like that’s the most accurate representation of life. Even if it’s an ending, new things are on the way. Or even if it is a happy ending, it might pass one day. I feel like ultimately, with characters, I want them to go through a journey or go through some sort of transformation of epiphany. So it’s more a matter of that than whether it’s happy or sad.

when making art, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum—you need at least one audience member, and that’s sort of an extension of life itself too. You need at least two people. The quote I always go back to—I think Tony Kushner said this in the introduction to Angels in America—is “The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one.” That’s a quote that has always reverberated with me.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an article about:

Yumi Sakugawa