Fine artist Samurai Farai says speaking about mental health in his work is a priority

June is Men’s Mental Health Month and the spotlight falls on how men take care of themselves. While older men are reluctant to speak about their mental health wellness, young men seem more open to speaking about how they feel.

Fine artist Samurai Farai speaks with passion about his mental health.

“It’s a priority for me because once I normalise speaking about it, it sits at the top, it doesn’t get buried underneath. If I can use whatever momentum I have to encourage and influence young people my age or older to discuss these things, then I feel that I’m doing something good.”

The artist, whose real name is Farai Engelbrecht, spoke to The Citizen at the One Night Only Classic Remix experience in Sandton.

The event was organised by 608 Experiences, a division of GRID Worldwide. Together with Gallo Record Company, the organisers launched a remixed version of Mango Groove’s iconic song Hometalk, in honour of Youth Day.

Grammy award winning artist Zakes Bantwini and musician turned Chef J’Something were some of the performances on the day.

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Importance of mental wellness

“In our country we’ve lost enough people in the celebrity limelight to suicide, to depression, for us to realise it’s an actual thing. For us to lose another person to suicide would be the result of irresponsibility as a community.”

Samurai Farai has dealt with mental health throughout his life after going through a tough childhood, where he and his family moved around a lot in Johannesburg.

“Losing my father to Cancer, I was 11 years old and having to engage with that trauma at a young age is nothing short of mind blowing,” shares Samurai.

Samurai said he also witnessed his mother go through domestic abuse.

“It’s like a dream that doesn’t actually end. Figuring out how to cope with that didn’t look the prettiest. I went through crazy escapades man, whether it was alcohol or substance abuse, it was something hard for me to cope with.”

Escaping reality

Samurai Farai’s art is inspired by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the cartoons he grew up watching. “From a very young age, my imagination is something I’ve used to escape reality. Growing up the way I did, I sometimes did not have the resources to do what the other kids could do,” says the 25-year-old artist.

“Creativity has allowed me to create, construct and curate this world where everything and anything is possible. From a very young age, I really leaned on it. It wasn’t something I did for fun, it was something almost intrinsically intertwined with my well-being as a person,” shares Samurai Farai.

The artist has a fondness for cartoons, from Anime, Dragonball Z to Pokémon. “That just made me believe. The funny thing is that Anime and the cartoon world is such a very complex space. Cartoons like The Boondocks get to discuss reality in a humorous way, but it’s disguised as humour.

“I look at the similarities between cartoons, anime and my work. I use these bright colours intentionally and this childlike expression to discuss something very deep.”

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Sobriety

After years of struggling with substance abuse, Samurai has been on a journey of sobriety for eight months now.

“Being in the place that I am now, I realise that my creativity and passion for art is always been my tool of healing any traumatic situation.”

“I want to break the trend of the artist who needs substances to be creative. I can’t tell you that I create work that touches on mental health and that instigates the normalisation of mental health while it’s not a priority in my life,” says Samurai Farai.

The young artist would like his story to be an inspiration to kids who come from impoverished backgrounds similar to his.

“To show kids who look like me and who are younger than me that you can use this talent, you can create a world for yourself just by doing what you love.”

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Importance of education

Most creatives shun getting an education, choosing to rely solely on their talent but that can be limiting sometimes.

Samurai Farai understands the role education has played in his work. He studied at the renowned Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

“One thing my grandmother always told me was ‘get your education because that’s the one thing people can never take away from you’, not say that I advocate for people to go to university and school, but for me – my knowledge was something that could never be disposed from me.”

 “There was a lot of information that I really absorbed about the arts that informed my position in the whole art movement and contemporary ecology. Studying the lenses, the tropes, the dichotomies gave me the edge,” he says.

Due to his work being on the pulse of pop culture, Samurai Farai sometimes gets confused for a street artist but he respectfully distances himself from that tag. 

“I use spray cans, but that doesn’t make me a street artist.” He designed A-Reece’s album cover for Today’s Tragedy, Tomorrow’s Memory: The Mixtape.

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