(soft piano music) - My role as an artist really is to question.

I put on thought-provoking shows that really challenge the status quo and get people to think differently about the world.

There's stuff that has happened in art history that we can see unfolding today.

And my job is just to mark this moment and record it and to make sure we can't forget it.

My name is Raj Bunnag.

I am a professional printmaker and my home is Durham, North Carolina.

I started making art as a kid.

We didn't have a lot of money growing up.

My parents, they were working immigrant parents.

They didn't have all the time in the world to kind of look after me.

I ended up drawing a lot of my own monsters and toys out of paper.

Art became that thing that helped entertain me.

Process that I use is relief printmaking, which is a form of printmaking where I'm carving the surface of a linoleum block, rolling ink out on that block, and then printing it using a giant printing press.

This process is very much a meditative process for me and kind of how I deal with the world.

Taking these intense subjects, putting them on linoleum, drawing them and carving them out.

I don't, it's therapy.

The world just falls away.

I got over-inked over here, though.

But this looks good.

The car looks good.

(gentle music) When I was a kid, a lot of the art that I was drawn to was art of mythology.

Anything Greek-related, Norse-related, Native American-related that was illustrated in the library, in the kid's section, I was all over it.

Going from there, I started becoming obsessed with the history of military illustrations, specifically Francisca de Goya's "Disasters of War" and Jacques Quescalo's "Miseries and Misfortunes of War."

The "Disasters of War" was Francisca de Goya's capturing of French-- (gentle music) This was going to be my thesis.

It's 12 feet long, but I hated it so much 'cause it was so boring.

So I went from doing stuff like this to stuff like that.

Once I started figuring out my style of making imagery, which is very much like a maximalist, fill the page, leaving space like that hurts me now.

I have to fill it up.

It has to, you can see the difference in just line density, so.

But yeah, but this one right here started it all.

My "March of the Druggernauts" series, I mean, I started that work because of my view and experience of the war on drugs.

It was kind of me taking symbols and pop culture surrounding it and just jam-packing it into these kind of maximalist images.

(gentle music) I started making larger than life prints because I could have a political print in a little frame and put it on the wall, but it's easy to walk by.

But when you have monsters that are nine feet tall, it's a little bit more jarring.

A lot of graffiti and street art exists in low-income neighborhoods.

Making this type of work, I don't want to put it in those places because this violence already exists in those places.

That's why I want this in those places.

That's why I want to put them in galleries.

I want to put them in suburbs.

I want them to exist in places that make people uncomfortable.

There's plenty of art that looks good over a couch or looks good over in your foyer or wherever, but we need more artists who are.

The work I'm making, it's very aggressive.

And so most kids of color will be, they're taught to don't be the nail that stands up.

Be as invisible as possible.

Don't stand out.

One of the things that definitely keeps me going is meeting younger artists who look like me or see my art or are fans of my art.

I know when I was a kid, there was no one that could look like me making art, or at least I didn't have access to them.

And so being able to be that in Durham and being able to inspire the kids who are like, you know, you can pursue art.

The two-headed bull is based off one of my father's drawings, one of the only surviving drawings that we have of his.

He was a much better artist than me, but he was of that generation where it wasn't realistic for him to pursue that career.

Using that drawing, I made my own bull.

And the reason I gave it two heads is kind of a representation of what it is to exist as an other here.

Using art, it gave me a power that I know nothing else and no other subject in any class has ever kind of given me that power.

I hope to like die on that printing press.

Like I'm gonna be printing until I'm dead.

That's like my goal is to keep carving, keep making.

Hopefully by that time I have like apprentices and like other people to tell them, yeah, go carve that, go get that paper, get, you know, and just be a grumpy old printmaker and just, you know, just keep making what I'm making and have the freedom to keep making what I'm making.

So, yeah.

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