Refractions 17: Walking Backwards into the Future

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 17
“Walking Backwards into the Future”
November, 2005




We have been taking my eldest son, Ty (17), on college tours of late, traveling mostly up and down the East Coast. Having been raised in New York City, he’s been curiously interested in only city schools. “An enclave of pseudo-community,” is the expression he’s used to describe some of the schools. Perhaps so, but I’ve been reminding him that some of the best education can be had in such enclaves (like Bucknell University, where my wife and I went). Perhaps being able to focus in a quiet bubble does have some merit? I asked. So far, he is not buying it.

I realized how much the climate of college selection has changed since I went through it in the Seventies. At Cornell University, a tour I also took with my father 25 years ago, I realized how much things have evolved since then. Colleges are big businesses, and self-assured marketing machines. Their successes are made visible in so many new building constructions. NYU and Columbia are buying up New York City, and practically every college we visited is expanding. But, as we journey the Hampton Inns (filled with seniors and their parents, all with the same looks of inevitability) and well marked admission buildings, we also discovered a new art form: student tour guides are now trained to walk backwards, and project their voices at the same time.

Not so, when I toured colleges as a teenager way back when, as we meekly followed the guides around the campus. We walked the grounds, without really looking for any amenities. When did a college education begin to involve new sports complex that combines a Crunch-like gym, with accompanying trainers, with rock climbing walls? Back then, we toured the libraries and soaked it all in very seriously, but somewhat casually. College tours today have evolved now into individual performances worthy of rating and timing, much like a skating competition. I suppose in a competitive business of education, and how much is at stake, it pays to train students to walk backwards to save time. Perhaps it speaks of the confidence that colleges place in their own students, to equip them with such indispensable training for life.

Aside from the technical requirements of such a performance -- such as their projection of voice, not falling into the cracks in the sidewalks, getting you back in time for their “informational meeting” (i.e., to answer how we can possibly afford this education), or not getting run over by a car (although they assured us that cars in the campuses, always stop for pedestrians) -- there’s the human, artistic element that needs to be cultivated for an excellent college tour guides. Humor, ability to pull out questions from prospective students, handling of anxious parents to make them feel at ease, all combine to make college tours (if you are privileged to take one from a good guide) rather an intriguing affair. I found, over time, I became an expert with my son at rating the tours. If they give you cookies in the middle of the tour in one of their many neon lit cafeterias, my rating seems to go up. If the student tour guide is too nervous, we try to bear with that, but the worst is usually not the student’s fault, but weather related (a blizzard in Syracuse! Minus ten points) or colleges too calculated with excessive marketing (i.e., a video piece showing many athletes and “diverse” body life of the students all smiling in their successes. A huge deduction in Ty’s mind).

So as we toured campuses, naturally I began to ponder not just what makes a good tour guide, but a good education in general. After having a discussion of this issue with my son at one school’s “Asian” cafeteria in Baltimore (yes, having good sushi in the cafeteria earns a few points), we decided that a good education is learning to walk backwards in to the future. Perhaps these college tour guides do have something to teach us, after all.

We raised our three children to, indeed, look back, to respect the tradition and history that they have come from. Rather than promising them an unlimited future, I found myself teaching them to steward carefully the gift mix they have. I wanted them to know the best of our traditions, from Shakespeare and Bach to Hemingway. I want them to also know how much their own time echoes in the various chambers of history, and are relevant in their post-9/11 experience. I want them to understand that in our mixed race-and-culture marriage between Judy (Irish/English/Scottish) and I (Japanese and God knows what else*), they represent in their mixed blood the very promise of reconciliation of nations that once were at war. But we also do not want them to dwell there, but to walk confidently towards a goal of their own path. We have tried to teach them that success is not worldly success of money and fame, but being faithful to the unique journey God has called them to. Education must be past-focused and future-focused at the same time. Our job is to help a child discover the uniqueness of their calling that only they can walk in.

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Paul Elie, in a recent book “The Life You Save May Be of Your Own: An American Pilgrimage” poignantly looks back to portray the journey of Flannery O’Connor, Doris Day, Walker Percey and Thomas Merton. As he recounts the life and art of Flannery O’Connor, arguably the most influential writer of the mid-Twentieth Century, he notes that at age five, O’Connor trained one of her chickens to walk backwards. A reporter from New York City somehow found out, and took a newsreel, with the title UNIQUE CHICKEN GOES IN REVERSE:

Elie writes: “The episode lasts less than a minute. Yet Mary Flannery O’Connor had been changed by it. She perceived that she had an unusual gift, even if it was just a gift for getting a certain kind of chicken to walk a certain way; and she saw that her challenge in life would be to make the nature of her gift clear to people who wouldn’t understand it otherwise…The chicken was a freak, a grotesque, and when a cameraman came all the way from New York to Savannah to photograph her just because she had trained it, she was suddenly a kind of freak, too” Pg. 13-14

O’Connor’s early experience shaped the vocabulary of her fiction. It seems that she not only trained her chicken to walk backwards, she trained herself to write and see in a kind of a backward manner. She reverses the conventionalities of a southern world-view, with a wry critical stance, exposing the superficial evils of a “Christ haunted south.” Her characters, like the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or Hazel Mote in “Wise Blood,” speak out of the violent cores of our existence, so explosive and obsessive, and yet devastatingly precise in their actions. They will not be comfortably shaped into the future, but they resolutely and awkwardly remain in their pasts, walking reverse in a kind of self-tormenting labyrinth.

But in doing so, she gently lights the grace journey that lies deep beneath our feet. She walks backwards into a unique world, projecting her voice in an anguished, compressed scream, but what she actually describes is a transformative, rather hopeful series of epiphanies, intentionally cast into our own evil filled darkness and desires. What she accomplished in her short stories and one novel (she died very young) is noteworthy exactly because these stories arise from an unexpected place of exile, a voice of a Catholic in the Protestant south. They look backwards, having eyes upon Dante and Shakespeare in influence, but they also map a new territory of contemporary fiction. O’Connor’s stories seem fantastic and freakish at first, but we do grow into them, as we are so much in need of their vigor today, her dark vision so filled with faith.**

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As I negotiated the I-95 to get us home, and as Ty recited Hamlet in the passenger seat for his senior literature class, I pondered how much of our education is about the past, and how much is about the future. Of course, it is about both. I then realized that he has been walking backwards already without much fanfare. Whenever a student decides to stay true to his faith as a Christian in a public school in New York City as he has, he/she is walking backwards. When a student today is committed to keeping himself sexually pure, as he has endeavored to do with his girlfriend, he is walking backwards into the currents of cultural norms. When a student decides, on his own, to start a conservative club in his liberal Quaker school (with his Jewish buddy), he is definitely walking backwards. His teachers and fellow students may not agree with him, but he, with humor, manages. No matter where he ends up, or what he chooses to do in the future, he knows what it means to negotiate the labyrinth of complex pluralism of our day. The key, I realized for him as for me, is walking backwards and paying attention to what comes ahead, at the same time. That takes a kind of zany, awkward commitment not normally encouraged in schools nor in the world. More importantly, such a stance forces him to lead others, projecting his voice, and assuring them that their decision matters, too.

So, as we anxiously await his decision on his future (he decided to apply early decision to NYU), wondering how we ourselves ever got accepted by any college -- it seems we are to feel rather inferior about not measuring up, so when they do let him in, we can simply be grateful for the opportunity to send him with much enthusiasm -- I have learned much from these tour guides. Art today, too, suffers from certain amnesia (“post-modernism is xenophobic to the past” as Tom Oden states). Perhaps the best of art, too, is made via a backwards glance, and not simply blindly forging ahead, or we may end up, like O’Connor’s characters, trapped in futility? Perhaps by paying careful attention to the historical landmarks around us, and by artfully describing the milieu via naming the new experiences, we will stumble onto a vision that maps a new territory for art? Whether we buy into the hype of college admissions or not, one thing is for sure: The Twenty-First Century will be lead by creative children who boldly dare to lead, backwards. Their voices, like Flannery O’Connor’s, will project into the future corridors of their making, and we shall indeed be glad for that. To have such guides is worth any price, any sacrifice.



Makoto Fujimura

P.S. our Cornell guide did receive the highest points of all the guides so far.



*Most people assume that Japanese people are homogeneous. But the early history of Japan tells us that Nara, then the capital of Japan, was the end point of the Silk Road, and was as diverse as Queens is today.

** I am deeply grateful for Professor Robert Love Taylor who introduced Flannery O’Connor to me, a student who could barely write English at the time I arrived at Bucknell. Bubble or not, this starting point of my journey into the world of literature and art has let me to a deep well of creativity and expression.

Image: A Valentine’s Day Card from 1987. The year before we had Ty. This card proved prophetic…we ended up with the same number of children as the heart-shaped eggs!

Water Flames Review

Water Flames Exhibit has been selected on Terry Teachout's top five list.

http://www.terryteachout.com/aboutlastnight/sidestuff/topfive.shtml

GALLERY: Makoto Fujimura, Water Flames (Sara Tecchia Roma New York, 529 W. 20, up through Oct. 23). An exceptionally handsome new Chelsea gallery opens its doors with a show of large-scale paintings on paper inspired by a line borrowed by T.S. Eliot from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “The fire and the rose are one.” In these spacious, intensely colored visualizations of the essence of fire, Makoto Fujimura fuses Pollock-like pigment-dripping with medieval Japanese painting techniques. The results are at once spectacular in their immediate effect and unexpectedly intimate in the spell they cast on the attentive viewer. Be sure to take a look at the short documentary film in which Fujimura demonstrates how these works were created—and don’t overlook the smaller paintings hanging in the offices just off the main gallery (TT).

Exhibit continues until 10/22...

Water Flames Artist's Talk

Thank you for coming to this artist-talk event and the exhibit Water Flames. I am grateful for this dialogue, and to be on this journey together. I want to thank Sara and Benjamin for their support, as well as allowing me to speak tonight.



And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.



So wrote T.S. Eliot in “Four Quartets.”

In 2002, mere months after September 11th, I began a series of paintings based on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”. The Four Quartets reveal a poet who struggled to understand the darkness of a war-torn world, and yet became a resolute voice of hope despite the darkness around him. His personal journey was one of being “disastrously married, accidentally expatriated, emotionally dependent… “ (Dana Gioia). And yet he reached that place of stillness. I needed to journey with the poet through “The Waste Land” into that “still point of the turning world” in my poet 9/11 experience.

I asked my writer friend who first introduced me to the “Four Quartets,” where the expression “the fire and the rose are one” originated and he kindly directed me to Dante. Apparently, Dante informed Eliot’s imaginative landscape, and Dante was to Eliot what Virgil was to Dante, a poetic and even spiritual guide and a mentor.

I thus began the “Water Flames” paintings wanting to further explore the “knot of fire”. It was an intense, intimidating battle at first, as I began to experience the enormity and weight that this theme brings into my art. It is a fearsome task to deal with fire.


I could find very few paintings of fire in modern times, which depict fire as a source of mystery and life, rather than a source of destruction. There are a few fire images by Ernst, Kiefer or Viola, and yet as a whole modern artists have not been very explicit. And yet, flames, particularly the flames of life, play a central role from Egyptian times to Giotto, with many examples up to medieval times. In Japan, fire images are very present and alive from “Zigoku Zoshi (Stories of Hell for Buddhist Priests)” to Gyoshu Hayami’s “Flame Dance.” Iri and Toshi Maruki’s Nihonga paintings of Hiroshima captured the sinister power of that living hell. After that, I dare say very few, except for the possible exception of my mentor Matazo Kayama, have painted fire as a life force. In 20th Century western works, one can surmise that Rothko’s and Richter’s are all paintings of fire, echoing the reality of an atomic age. In that sense, Eliot’s words “the Fire and the Rose are One” reverberate throughout the metaphysical art of modern times, and I am only starting to grasp the potential of such an expression.

Dorothy Sayers, in her exquisite commentaries of on Dante’s Inferno, states: “it is the weakness of Humanism to fall short in the imagination of ecstasy.” Dante’s works that begin in the perilous seas and a dark wood where “the right road was wholly lost and gone”, ends in “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” I am aiming for this integration of elements, spiritual and physical, in these works that somehow capture the “imagination of ecstasy.” It is a journey that is driven upward. It is a journey of hope in a midst of darkness.




I use ground minerals and basic earth materials. I mix the pigments with Nikawa hide glue, and paint with water onto Kumohada hand lifted Japanese paper. I realized that, during the process of painting these images, that I had been painting fire all the time, but did not know that. For instance, even if I were to paint a flower, or a bird, or a landscape I was painting a burning rose, burning wings and burning mountains. I want to get at the mystery of what is behind an object or a landscape. And I have increasingly become more and more monochromatic in doing so. But the materials I use will refract, catching the most delicate, complex light, so they are multi-chromatic paintings that look monochromatic.

In the Water Flames, I am focused more intently on the process of creating. I speak about this in the mini-documentary shown here, but there are two sides of experiencing a work of art: process and product. It is interesting to ponder whether Dante’s work is more about the process of that journey, or the final destination. Dante never finished the work (as Sayers never finished the translation), and therefore one might argue that it was process driven – that it was experiential work. But throughout the journey, there is a pointed teleological directive, a type of conviction about the direction of the journey. L’Inferno begins:

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

But even there, lost in darkness,

Then I looked up, and saw the morning rays
Mantle its shoulder from that planet bright
Which guides men’s feel aright on all their ways:

In order to appreciate the experience of the journey, then, we must be convinced, also of the end point. This is what I experienced, as an artist, working on these paintings. There’s a certain way that process driven art relies on the end vision, and without such conviction in resolution, we can’t trust the process of creativity. A creative journey must be both the recognition of what is “lost and gone” in that dark wood, and at the same time be guided by a creative force that transcends our own capacities. We must see the morning rays
Mantle its shoulder from that planet bright, and that requires a kind of faith.


Dorothy Sayers seems to write her commentaries defending Dante from modernist critics who seem to relate to Inferno, and less so with Purgatorio and reject Paradiso all together. But Paradiso imagery is not an afterthought, but an end point of the journey that is necessary to see “the morning rays”. This is one of the keys to understanding Dante:

T.S. Eliot wrote:

.…because he could do everything else, is for that reason the greatest 'religious' poet, though to call him [merely] a 'religious poet' would be to abate his universality. The Divine Comedy expresses everything in the way of emotion, between depravity's despair and the beatific vision, that man is capable of experiencing. (T.S. Eliot on Dante)

Dante wants us to dive deeper into “depravity's despair” by and through the “the beatific vision.” So in that sense, it does not make sense to read L’Inferno without knowing Il Paradiso. There is a good reason why Dante titled this The Divine Comedy, and not The Divine Tragedy. It is from the first page to the last, a teleological journey upward.

This quote by Eliot actually prompts a few questions for me: questions that I have asked myself as I prepared the Water Flames paintings:


Dante is framing our question for both art and life, and that is why we must see Dante as a universal poet: Eliot unpacks this question to helps us to ask what is our expression of “depravity’s despair and the beatific vision” today? How does our contemporary expression compare to the emotional range of Dante?

Eric Fischl recently noted:

Artists connected with the church were asked to imagine four things; what heaven was like, what hell was like and what the Garden was like before and after the Fall. Those are four profound archetypes, and they're part of many cultures. What has happened over the centuries is the artists in the West have become specialized. You still find heaven painters, hell painters and Garden painters, but you rarely find them in the same person. In a way, that denies the full scope of the imaginative world.

Eric Fischl Art in America

We need to recover the “full scope of the imaginative world.” I believe it is possible to develop future art that has the range of Dante. But we must understand, that a different type of journey is required.





Soon after 9/11, I found myself needing to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I suppose being a “ground zero” resident now, I wanted to understand the real Ground Zero. When I was in Hiroshima, I took video footage of the memorial flames there. I used the footage in a post-9/11 installation called “Two-T” exhibit, a collaboration with Albert Pedulla.

Then I had another opportunity to collaborate in a production called Shangri-La, a modern opera composed by Susie Ibarra and written by Yusef Kumunyakaa. For the Kitchen production, Susie asked me to consider doing the visuals. We decided to use in the background images, frozen stills, of the flames of Hiroshima. As I was looking at them from the back of the stage, I realized that the images resonated so much with the direction I was moving towards, and Dante’s universe. So I appropriated these images of flames, and began the last few images of Water Flames.

Fire can be illustrated easily, and the abbreviated forms can be found everywhere, from “explosive content” labels to the Methodist Church’s logo. But how is fire’s essence to be captured? What is its shape? How do you describe its energy? Capture its heat? When fire becomes more than merely a symbol, but a phenomenon, then the depiction of flames become a difficult, if not an impossible, task. The attempt is to capture the essence of something you think you see, but in reality is elusive to capture. Fire is at once recognizable and yet mysteriously abstract at the same time.

The materials I use, mostly derived from the medieval methods of Japan, lend themselves to a subtle intersection between abstraction and representation hidden behind the four basic elements: Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Pulverized precious minerals, gifts from the earth, are layered with water onto Japanese mulberry and hemp fibers, creating a semi-permanent surface. The prismatic semi-opaque layers trap light, creating refraction of light for the eyes to delight in. Paper breathes, accommodating itself to the environment, and thus continues to mold itself to the surroundings, and that process is captured by the watermarks on the surface. Gold powder, mixed with animal hide glue, is the ideal color to be placed on top of Japanese vermillion and cochineal (derived from a tiny insect in India). The surface itself is an ecosystem of colors combining earth with air, and water with, in this new series, fire.

Of course, my paintings of flames could be read as “religious.” I am certainly risking that as I paint these images of Flames of Life. To me, to paint is to reveal the inner most chambers of my existence. Therefore, my work has a specific, transcendent purpose for me. Yes, I do want my art to be the “burning bush” that emits fiery power and yet exudes life. As I stated, I am convinced that our contemporary expressions need to recapture “depravity’s despair and the beatific vision” once again. If not, we incapacitate ourselves to a certain resignation: how would we understand our world of Hiroshima and 9/11 otherwise? How do we express the depth and breath of both our dark realities and resolute hope at the same time?




I find the most intriguing of the three books of The Divine Comedy to be Purgatorio. Why? Well, it is exactly because it is sandwiched between “depravity’s despair” and “the beatific vision.” Any utopian or dystopian vision can lose sight of the significance of suffering: the utopian vision tends to assume that suffering is illusionary, and the the dystopian vision might consider suffering to be the only reality. But Purgatorio assumes that suffering of the journey is very necessary to purify as gold, the divine grace that resides within.



Currently, at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Joel Sternfeld’s “Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America.” His photographs capture the enormous varieties of utopian communities in America, ranging from early Mormonism, Mayor Daley’s attempt to create green rooftops in Chicago to cultish visionaries. What you see in these depictions is the struggle and fascination we have toward our common search for the ideal. But as diverse as they are when you see them, I think you will note how similar they are. They all have common Edenic desires to get back to the Garden of Eden. But we also see that idealism is often met with disappointments. I wonder if in some profound way Sternfeld has captured a part of America that we all struggle with. We are suspicious of anyone who claims to have found the answer. And we are suspicious of Dante exactly for this reason.



But Dante, is not utopian or dystopian. Purgatorio is necessary exactly as a bridge between dystopia of Inferno and what we might see as the “utopia” of Paradiso.




Note that, for Protestant Christians, we need to know that what happens in Dante’s purgatory is not what we often misunderstand it to be: it is not a place for lost souls, or souls that do not know where they will end up. If you read Dante (and Catholic theology), you know that every cornice of the purgatory represents steps of sanctification. Purgatory is a place for those who know their final destination is heaven, and those who know that their earthly journey did not allow, for whatever the reason, the purification from what corrupts a person. I find, as a Christian, these verses of Purgatorio enormously helpful. As I struggle to understand my place in God’s graced Kingdom, I know that my journey needs to be challenged by fire, my inner corruptions exposed, and my convictions tested and purified. Further, I know, as an artist, that this is exactly what is needed in the process of art. There is no easy path. My creative process is filled with encounters with the “heavy cairn of stones.” And I must deal with them, one mineral at a time.

Where he and I burned in one furnace-blast;
The visionary fire so seared me through,
It broke my sleep perforce, and the dream passed.

This dream parallels the journey of a creative artist, who sees the need for “visionary fire” to sear us through. We know that in order to create, we must destroy something. In order for the minerals to refract beautifully, they must be pulverized. So Dante’s dream of purgatory seems apt in light of the process of creativity. It is a journey of beauty that the Japanese of old understood: ultimate beauty is necessarily tied with death, and sacrifice.

T.S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets:


The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire



How can one be redeemed from fire by fire? Well, Eliot suggests that the fire of despair can turn into the fire of sanctification. This is the transition from the fire of the Inferno to the fire of Purgatorio. And as Eliot suggests here, it does lie in our “choice of pyre to pyre.” What exactly is this choice?

In Inferno and Purgatorio, Dante is guided by Virgil, and is devastated to find that Virgil disappears. And yet, at this turning point, is where he realizes that Beatrice (with her eyes and her mouth expressing the beatific vision) is her guide. She represents the vision of sacrificial love (a presence of Christ) that will ultimately guide him to Paradiso. And this transition of vision is given to us as a choice:


The angels cry out:

Do us more grace, and of thy grace reveal
Thy mouth to him, so that he may discern
The second beauty which thou dost conceal.

And Dante:

O splendour of the living light eterne,
What man that e’er beneath Parnassus’ shade
Grew pale, or from its fountain filled his urn…

There where all heaven harmonious shadows thee

Purgatorio, Canto XXXI, 136-141,145

Parnassus’s shade is referring to Apollo, the god of music, poetry and reason. Dante’s encounter with the “second beauty” accompanies the loss of Virgil, and it represents his inner death. Dante is dying to his need for his beloved guide, and his dependence on even Apollo, the god of poetry and reason. All things, even his art, and his own reason, is to be shadowed by this second beauty. Art as a guide can only go so far. My writer friend who guided me to read Dante tells me in our recent email correspondence: “that in the end, whatever our religious beliefs, we're hoping for something like grace to help our work go further than we can intend or achieve on our own” Our art must die to itself, in other words, in order that the fire of destruction can become the fire of life everlasting. And for that, a certain sacrifice is needed, a divine sacrifice of cosmic proportions that pours into us grace.



The upward journey, then, is fueled by this grace alone. These Water Flames paintings trace that journey of discovery, of dying to myself, and even to art. It is an invitation to the viewer to journey with me, with your creative offerings, to encounter this “second beauty” as well. Like Dante, we may need to descend, before we can be brought upward: certainly, we need to recover the language of heaven in our times, in order to understand the dark realm of our own nightmares. We may even be dismayed to find that the guide that we so idealized was inadequate. But if we can journey from “pyre to pyre”, we will recover the redemptive, imaginative landscape. We have to consider the alternative. Do we not have but a limited window of time today to infuse hope in the global dialogue? This is the work of imagination as much as it is a “flesh and blood” struggle. The journey of humility must take place for all of us, or the consequences will be dire. The stewardship of our creative journey, the development of that “full scope of the imaginative world” is needed, or we will succumb to the hopeless futility of the ideological and fear driven terrors of our day. Terror does take away imaginative hope. So the battle does rage in the creative realms dominated by vengeance, fear and despair verses the realms of humility, of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

I hope these images point to the ultimate flames of life, flames that burn and yet do not consume us; and as we find our own dross being purged, and golden fire burn brightly within, may we, with Dante, find the “splendour of the living light” smiling upon us.

Water Flames Exhibit

In a beautiful new gallery, I am pleased to install these new works, loosely based on Dante's The Divine Comedy. Please note the artist talk event on Oct. 7th will also feature Susie Ibarra. Her music is dubbed with a documentary style video in the video created by Joey Tomassoni's team in the video room.

Check out the photos from the opening!

Makoto Fujimura Opening at Sara Tecchia Roma

And a blog interview at http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt/ Click on where it says "mp3" and you can hear my conversation with digital artist G.H. Hovagimyan.

Why Art?

I am down in Leesburg, Florida visiting my parents in law. My father in law, Terry Beebe, is on the board of Leesburg Center for the Arts, and invited me to speak to supporters of the arts. It was my delight to do so.

Here's what I spoke on:

Why Art?

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle




As an artist, I often find myself trying to answer “Why Art?” Why is art necessary in our lives and in our education? How can I justify spending so much of my time and expenses invested in being an artist, and helping others by advocating for their artistic expressions? Why do we need the arts here in Leesburg? We have now much research pointing to the economic benefit of bringing art into communities. We have efforts to scientifically prove that the arts help us directly in education, in improving children’s school grades, and helping them to engage better with their worlds. I can give you evidence of how the arts help slow down dementia and reduce stress. (see Gifts of the Muse, by Rand Corporation)

But usually, in these gatherings, I end up listening to people, by finding out what deeply matters to them. And I often find that in the areas that they are most engaged in, and most passionate about, art is already present in that conversation. The person I may be speaking with may not know anything about art in New York, but he/she may talk about their children’s dream to become a dancer or an actor. They may talk about a movie they just saw that affected them deeply. They may speak of their business enterprises and find out that now businesses are starting to realize that the “bottom line” is not really sufficient; but there is a “second bottom line,” or a third. Business schools are now inviting designers to discuss creativity and design, to apply these principles into business practices because worker are no longer content to work in “bottom line” driven companies, but they want their whole person affirmed, and they want community. What I hear these workers stating, is that they want their humanity back. And in that conversation, art always presents itself as an expression of that humanity.

I was recently speaking at a church in NYC, and asked the people what they enjoy doing on Sundays apart from going to church. And everything they listed had something to do with the arts and entertainment. Art is everywhere, from the food we order in restaurants, to clothes we purchase, to paintings hanging on museums. Aristotle defined the arts as “our capacity to make.” So we could broaden our discussion into medicine and sciences. Even if we do not include these sister disciplines in our discussions, one thing is for sure: Our cultural productions and our art will defines us, whether we like it or not. Art expresses who we are.

One of the most frustrating moments in recent memory, for myself as an arts advocate, was to see the Super Bowl half time show knowing, that for the first time, that Janet Jackson fiasco was being broadcast in China. What do the Chinese think of us now? We have come to define ourselves by how we degrade ourselves, and we have exported that vision to the world.

When I traveled with The First Lady to represent the USA at the UNESCO general assembly several years ago (http://www.amb-usa.fr/usunesco/DELEG.HTM), one of the the UNESCO officials told us of her fears in America’s reengagement with UNESCO: “We are struggling to believe that the US can bring more than McDonalds, Coca Cola or Hollywood movies (I might add pornography to that list, but she was too polite).” We tried to convince her and other UNESCO leaders that we have a very unique patronage system that encourages our democratic patronage of the arts like the NEA and NEH. But it was when she connected with our projects with Shakespeare and Jazz Masters programs and touring of Martha Graham dance troops that convinced her that we were committed to a higher vision. These distinctively American forms of art, I would argue, are the greatest fruits of our democracy. And we have every reason to celebrate and broadcast with pride what freedom has brought us.


Tolstoy stated “Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling”.


Art is a building block of civilization. A civilization that does not value its artistic expressions is a civilization that does not value itself. These tangible artistic expressions help us to understand ourselves. The arts teach us to respect both the diversity of our communities and the strength of our traditions. I encourage people not to segment art into an “extra” sphere of life and decorations. Why? Because art is everywhere, and has already taken root in our lives.

Therefore, the questions is not so much “why art?” but “which art?” We are presented with a choice. And this choice is a responsibility of cultural stewardship. Just as we have responsibility for natural resources, so do we have to take stewardship care of our culture.

What, then, does the current cultural ecosystem look like? NEA Research such as Reading at Risk, is pointing to a cultural epidemic of disengagement. The studies point to how we are reading less and less, but even more pronounced, in my mind, is how we are less engaged with civic activities, with nature (and even sports!).


The Columbine High School incident and 9/11 taught us that we can either use our imagination for destroy lives or to save lives. We have on the one hand a girl reading Macbeth (she wanted to be an actor) in the library, and on the other a teen pointing a gun at her head and asking her “do you still believe in God?” And she said “yes” and was shot. Her words affirmed the source of her life and salvation, and inspired countless others to express that belief: His actions prompted others to copy the destructive acts of horrors. On 9/11 we had, on the one hand, militant hijackers who took their imaginative vengeance into determined evil acts. On the other hand were firefighters who climbed the falling towers. We have to realize that before any of these acts were committed, they were imagined. We swim in the ecosystem of imagined actions. We do have a responsibility to that power. We do have a choice between saving lives, or destroying lives.

If we do not teach our children, and ourselves, that what we imagine, and how we design the world, can make a difference, the culture of cynicism will do that for us. If we do not take the initiative to love our neighbors by imagining better neighborhoods and cities, despair will take the imaginations of their children and turn them into destructive forces.

A few hopeful examples in the ecosystem of culture today:

1) Rafe Esquith, a National Medal of Arts recipient two years ago for his efforts
among the Hobart Elementary School children of inner city Los Angeles,
challenges immigrant children, many of whom do not speak English, to
memorize and perform Shakespeare. In the recent ceremony announcing
"American Masterpieces," a new N.E.A. initiative to bring masterpieces of visual art, dance and music to American cities, regional museums and
schools, the First Lady and other guests sat in awe as two of Mr. Esquith's students performed Henry the Fifth. Beyond knowing their demanding lines, they gave life to the words and elevated us all in the audience. Their childlike but confident orations had a beauty and a deeper resonance, something that this nation desperately needs to hear and understand today when these sounds are too often drowned out by crass commercial noise. Our children's voices can be elevated, drawing the world's attention to excellence, and the nobility of civilization.



2) About 20 years ago, Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston, South Carolina woke up one day and realized that being a mayor means that you are the chief architect and designer of your city. He came to the NEA and asked for help because he knew nothing about design. What a humble man. He states: “We mayors exhaust ourselves with lots of decisions – political, personnel, budget. But 100 years from now, there will be no real evidence of how we made those decisions. In contrast, a decision about the physical design of a city will influence the city and its people for generations.” Now the Mayors Institute has helped over 625 mayors become the chief urban designers of their cities. 8 mayors are locked up in a room with 8 designers without the media or their aids. They share solutions, and dreams. Then they go home to their towns to see how the real life solutions can also benefit the environment and the general quality of life. This effort was so successful that it has grown to affect leadership at the state level. I just attended a press conference with NEA chairman Dana Gioa and Former Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Parris N. Glendening of Maryland to begin a Governor’s Institute on Community Design that brings this transformation into the state level.

The Governor’s Institute is co-sponsored by the NEA and the EPA. Strange bedfellows? No, it’s smart to connect the two -- again, it’s the issue of stewardship. The best design is most efficient, and friendly to the environment. The best design considers what the community needs first, and even her voiceless inhabitants. The best design brings beauty into our lives.


A journey of an artist in the ecosystem of culture:


I get to spend my days, thinking and imagining, painting and writing. I think about a journey that started as a child, simply wanting to draw and express, having encouraging parents, and being blessed with a wife who suffers alongside with me. The life of an artist is never easy, but I take it seriously because I know that imagination has consequences.

But I do, on occasion, go back to that question Why Art? Because it was a question I addressed to myself in a diary for a creative writing class in college, many years ago. My professor, wrote back in his comments: “your questions are valuable, and I encourage you to push that question further, as many of the writers and artists have done in the past: Why Live?”

Perhaps that’s why we need the arts in Leesburg. By continuing to create and imagine a better world, we live .

Zero Summer: for the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima

Zero Summer

Zero Summer imagines the unimaginable horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet points to epiphanic awakening that transcend human imagination at the same time. T.S. Eliot, who coined this term in his “Four Quartets,” longed for that eternal summer, birthed out of the "still point," where imagination is met with grace and truth.

Image: Makoto Fujimura, Zero Summer, 89"x69" Mineral Pigments and Gold on Kumohada Paper

Refractions 16: Optimal Foraging Theory

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 16
Optimal Foraging Theory: Can you have your birds and eat them, too?



On the day that the Arkansas Democrat reported the sighting of thought-to-be-extinct ivory-billed woodpeckers, I toured the Tyson kill factory in Springdale, Arkansas where two hundred thousand Cornish hens are eviscerated each day. The director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture’s Faith as a Way of Life Project, David Miller, had invited us, as members of the project (see Refractions Volume 1 for more details of the Faith as a Way of Life project) to experience the inner workings of a Fortune 500 Company whose C.E.O. is now a committed Christian. Tyson, the largest producer of protein products in the world, has indeed been going through a major change in recent years, and is now known to be a faith-friendly company. The tension of living out one’s faith in the workplace seemed to swirl within the greater tension that exists between stewardship of natural resources and capitalistic interests. It seemed rather an ironic coincidence, that on the same day, the newspapers reported this remarkable sighting of woodpeckers that many still believe today to be extinct.

Upon entering the factory, with my hair net, smock and fluorescent earplugs, we saw small hens hung by their legs on a silver conveyer harness, parading in front of us with mind-numbing efficiency. The steamy, yellow odor enveloped us, mixed with bleach, and drips (we were warned) were felt keenly on our smocks as we toured.

Every thirty minutes, the tour guide told us, the workers rotate positions. They told us that this was one way to keep the workers engaged in their tasks, and a result of recent changes. The turnover rate for the workers was close to 100 % annually a decade ago, but after their reforms, now the rate is close to 30%. The workers, apparently, are finding the changes amenable and finding opportunities within the company to advance.

There was one room, though, where only a few workers were spotted. It was the “zero” point of where the birds are killed with laser beams slicing their throats. The birds are captured, hung and plucked, with increasing automation with each step. The hardest manual task, as it turns out, is actually catching the birds, several of them at once, and then hooking them onto the conveyer belt. But everything else is automated, including the actual point of life and death. As I watched the birds one by one approach the “zero point” of a laser beam aimed at their necks, there was an eerie silence about, the weight of life hung heavily in the dark room. The whole scene reminded me of Sue Coe’s drawings (http://www.graphicwitness.org/coe/meatpack.htm).

Then they brought in the workers so that the people on our tour could meet and interview them. Half were migrant workers (legal, they assured us), and others were local folks. They introduced themselves one by one, some with translators, and spoke of their experiences. They spoke humbly but rather confidently of their company experiences, and they seemed open to our questions, acting more like giddy school friends talking to outsiders than assembly line workers.

Many of them do start at a low wage, hard manual labor, and they spoke of having to build up much physical stamina to work there. But they each insisted on emphasizing how caring this company was for them. The workers were replete with testimonials of how much they found the company to affirm their individual value. Of course, these were selected workers who have succeeded in the company. But the sheer contrast between what many consider to be visual cruelty behind the curtains and the relaxed smiles of the workers, who found much dignity here, surprised us. Something is going on here that is unexpected, and even graceful. One of the managers told us, before the workers arrived, that they had for a long time struggled to integrate racial and cultural barriers, but once the rotations began and they implemented work reform, they began to interact, and some formed very close relationships.

One of the workers, Della, told us that she had a special project to benefit the needs of a local community. The cookbook was called “Randall Road Cooking: Sharing and Caring for the Future of the Babies” to benefit the March of Dimes. In the cookbook were recipes contributed by the workers: Aunt Carries’ Potato Salad, Pollo al Vapor, Tamale Pie… and, of course, a recipe for Cornish Game Hens by the Plant Manager.




The ivory-billed woodpecker has not been sighted for 60 years. But a group of Cornell ornithologists did spot one in the Cache River in Arkansas recently (see http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/#). Larger than a crow, with distinctive plumage these handsome woodpeckers “need dead trees for nesting, and logging squeezed out the ivory bill, turning it into an accusatory ghost.” (James Gorman, NYT, Thursday, May 3rd)

When I was a student at Bucknell University, I studied Ornithology as part of a double major in art and animal behavior. I even spent cold, January days in a shack by the Susquehanna River taking data for “optimal foraging theory patterns of Chickadees.” Chickadees kept rather regular hours, as it turned out, coming in each day at similar times to forage, and this pattern could be interpreted with ecological significance. They, too, were efficient, saving their precious energies in a winter river-scape. It is a curious overlap, to see the vulnerable birds and their necessary efficiency, and the capitalistic efficiencies of our factories today. Both scenes mirror each other, overlapping in the needs of survival. Of course, we would be right to argue that our culture is a culture of wasteful efficiency. We have the capacity to alter and create the environment in ways that seem in some cases ridiculously destructive. In the wanton free-for-all drive to succeed, any capitalistic system craves for more and more. And in that kind of abundance, we are clearly in danger of damaging the delicate ecosystem, and losing our humanity in the process.

Does the spotting of the ivory-billed woodpecker represent part of the humanity we lost? And what did we really see at the kill factory in Springdale, Arkansas? Can we really eat our birds and save them, too?

Of course, as we toured Tyson, many of us might have pondered another obvious question related to this: Is it possible to be the CEO of a company and be a Christian? If the answer is yes, you might argue that finding one with much integrity is as difficult as spotting an ivory woodpecker (by the way, none has been spotted since the last reporting and the ornithologists are bickering over whether the proof of the last sighting is substantiated enough.) As skeptical as our group was when visiting the place, we had to admit that it took enormous courage for John Tyson to make his faith public did by weaving it into the core values of the company (see his core values statements: http://www.tysonfoodsinc.com/corporate/info/mission.asp). He was very honest with us about the tensions that he has to negotiate, the struggles he has gone through as the CEO and as a person. Questions filled our minds. Is it then possible to operate a faith-based company in which some million animals are killed each week? Are they “feeding the country” or simply being part of a consumer driven, capitalistic orgy?

Answers to such questions are never black and white. For instance, if these clean, efficient systems did not exist, avian SARS would have destroyed all of us by now. When Tsunami relief was given as an opportunity, this company filled the order, also with remarkable efficiency. They have the system in place to respond. And they are also able to export this system, whereby Cornish hens only require a month or so from hatching to the table. They are also providing much needed work to these local soils, creating a little city and culture, along with WalMart, in Bentonville, Arkansas.

And, perhaps most importantly, if the likes of the Tyson Company did not exist, I am not so sure that I could successfully chase a free-range chicken and catch it if I am hungry, let alone kill it and prepare it for the table. I would be the first to go extinct, in other words.

Perhaps we are just like the chickadees after all, saving their energies optimally so that we, too, can survive our winters. We are simply trying to do our best to survive in the competition of the marketplace, finding the most efficient means to eat. But there’s cost to this efficiency. All of the middle managers expressed how difficult it was to balance their family and church commitments with the stress of their jobs. These workers are enduring stress so that we can all celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. These holidays have, ironically, become the high noon of stress and death for many creatures.

Their company chaplaincy program, one of the largest in the country, addresses the various needs of the workers, including stress management. But there’s an inherent tension, and stress, in their own roles as well. The minister we spoke with told of a time when the workers went on a strike. He had to choose whether to march with the union or not (he did). After feeling the effects of intensity of the job, from low wage workers, to chaplains, to the C.E.O., I realized that those laser beams of consumerism were not just directed at the birds, but at all of us, and we are all being asked “what is our life about?”





We do long for a day, when ivory-billed woodpeckers will roam the dark shadows of Arkansas rivers, eating grubs and worms to their hearts’ content. Somehow, though, the ideals of that vision seem dream-like in the weight of the world’s conditions today. In the fiendish and ironic drama of survival and abundance, only the bottom line seems to matter. But what we need to think about is not just competitive drive of a successful American Company, but the issue of stewardship of our abundance. It is not the question of kill or not kill, but the issue of how much sacrifice, and for what purpose. The Bible points us to a place of abundance called the Shalom of God. The Bible does not prohibit the killing of animals. But it does deal harshly with our greed, our materialism, and the exploitation of those who are also made in the image of God. Instead, the scriptures point to a time when all things will be made beautiful, and every sacrifice is seen as the entry point of beauty. We need the ivory-billed woodpeckers in our lives, because we need appreciation of that fleeting vision of the beautiful, and what was lost. Their mysterious dark wings reveal part of what was sacrificed for our material abundance today. Further, the greater challenge may be to see that even a Tyson Cornish hen can point to that sacrificial need in our everyday lives. Can we, with grateful hearts, give thanks to the giver of life, not just for our capacity to survive, but to be given a vision of abundant grace, to thrive in God’s Shalom?

A youth pastor/writer member of the group commented: “Maybe we should consider sending our kids to observe this kill factory rather than some summer mission trip?” I nodded, and reached for my wallet to purchase one of Della’s cookbooks. I did want to, after all, participate in the communion of people of dignity, shared through their meals. They are the survivors of the ecosystem of consumerism. And I did want to know what Tamale Pie could taste like in Arkansas.

I do dream of seeing these woodpeckers someday, too. My search for them would be a fabulous way to honor Audubon, one of my favorite artists. These rare creatures are but a ghost of a time past, when survival of the fittest was the only reality, back when the harsh ecosystem might have killed more humans in winter than woodpeckers. Now, that reality is replaced by convenience and our comfort. Perhaps they were to be spotted only once, but in a fleeting moment. Perhaps they saw us, and understood what we have become, and they turned their backs on the world of Wal Marts and Burger Kings, spreading their wings to fly back in the hot, dark mysterious swamps of Arkansas, never to be seen again.

Makoto Fujimura


p.s. NPR recently commissioned a friend and a fellow collaborator in our journey of grace, Sufjan Stevens, to write a song on the ivory billed woodpecker, which he titled, “The Lord God Bird.” Check it out at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4721675

Image: Makoto Fujimura, Aijo, Collection of Tamaya Corporation, Japan, 1989

Refractions 15: Gretchen's Butterflies

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 15
Gretchen’s Butterflies




Bill T. Jones started to sing, as he stepped out from the audience. He sang an old spiritual, and he slowly stepped down the stairs moving into the main stage, and his body swayed, his feet began to tap. The Kitchen, a black-box theatre located in Chelsea, Manhattan, a catalyst for much of experimental art and music on recent times, was his stage, his artistic home. And yet, he was not here to perform, he was not here to start a new program, he was here for a memorial service.

Gretchen Bender had passed away at the age of 53, to the shock of her friends and colleagues who came to honor her on that cold January day. Many influential figures of the art world, like Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Elizabeth Streb were present. Her sister Valerie Godwin, whose husband Clyde pastored my home church, The Village Church, introduced us in 1999. Gretchen then graciously took part in my TriBeCa Temporary project, which I curated after September 11th, 2001.

Gretchen, as many participants in the service recalled, remained in the background of the emerging media art phenomena in the eighties. She was a pioneer in this new form as New York Times’ critic Roberta Smith wrote in her obituary. She was part of “the generation of early 1980’s Pictures Artists…Combining aspects of Conceptual Art and Pop Art, these artists used the images of popular culture to dissect its powerful codes, especially regarding gender and sexuality. “ Many credit her today with pioneering “the rapid-fire hyperediting now pervasive in film, television and video art.”

Her accomplishments range from PBS documentary to museum retrospectives. But to me, her public work of 1990’s collaboration with Miran Fukuda, in the Tameike-Sanno station in Tokyo continue to be etched in my mind.

Tameike-Sanno Collaboration appropriated, ironically, the images of the World Trade Towers. When I visited her studio, located in Southstreet Seaport near Ground Zero, she told me of her experience after 9/11: “I was sitting on the steps in front of my studio, reading an article in a newspaper about the ‘butterflies’ the Russians had dropped all over Afghanistan in the last war and I looked up from the paper and stared blankly as I tried to comprehend the meaning of the article: what kind of cruelty was it that children picked up these ‘butterflies’ floating down and were blown apart... A sense of general despair for the world began to creep into my whole being when, suddenly, two feet in front of me, a REAL butterfly floated by my face. I couldn’t move in astonishment. I had never seen a butterfly in all my years on South Street and it was November and it was ground zero air quality and where did this fragile emanation appear from? All those souls lifting out of the white dust, off the collapsed shards – a sacrifice, a gift, a hope, for a spiritual shift in the world.”

She then created an installation for TriBeCa Temporary project that became a highlight of our six months effort to “create an oasis of collaboration for Ground Zero artists.” She folded hundreds of white origami butterflies, and carefully arranged them on the floor, re-presenting her experience that, she repeatedly told me, was her “resurrection moment”.
Then she told me something remarkable: “I could never do this in Chelsea galleries or museums.” I asked her “why?” She answered “well, it’s too tender, and beautiful.”

One of her friends reminded me, at the memorial, this was the last work that she ever exhibited.

It was evident to those who attended the memorial service how much she struggled with the hype, the greed and the back-stabbing that characterized the art world. She was too sensitive, too vulnerable, and too unguarded. Her long time partner Mitchell Wagenberg, shared how he wrote down pages and pages of how the art world had destroyed her, but then felt to restrain his comments. He nevertheless wanted to convey how she was victimized and swallowed up by the vicious realities of the art world, and felt betrayed. But perhaps Mitchell did not have to share the details his notes. The service started to take on a confessional tone, where one after another, emotive expressions by artists recalled her delicate nature, giving account of their personal struggles in their relationships with her, and with each other. Perhaps the language used in describing the scene was too brutally honest for some. One of my friends commented afterwards: “I’ve never heard so many four-letter words at a memorial service!”

After Bill T Jones spoke and sang, one of Gretchen’s assistants stood to share a song. It was a song that Gretchen listened to in her studio on her tape player. The worn-out tape is by an underground artist I’ve never heard before called Daniel Johnston*, but the assistant said, “it’s from First Corinthians 13 in the Bible.” I was surprised, as I knew how much Gretchen struggled with the church and Christianity. And yet when he started to sing, almost everyone in the room knew the tune, except, ironically, those of us who were Christians. We knew the words well, but not the tune. “Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way…Love never ends.”

Perhaps Gretchen herself was “too tender and beautiful” for the art world after all. Perhaps she saw herself in that butterfly, a lone specter of a strange mystery in terrible dark days. Where would a creative butterfly like Gretchen migrate to? Would the art world continue to alienate and divide in our Darwinian grasp for a flash of spotlight? Would we then miss the small “resurrection moments” of our ordinary days? Gretchen, at last, saw the butterfly. Perhaps we would miss it or ignore it even if it flew in front of our eyes. Perhaps what we wanted to acknowledge on that cold day in January was the reality of how far we have fallen short of our own expectations and, even, our desires.

If Elaine Scarry (Beauty and Being Just, Princeton Press) is correct, true beauty forces us to admit our errors. Perhaps, in missing Gretchen, would we admit the vulnerability, and unguarded innocence of a true artistic experience? Would a community of broken, brutally honest, creative people lead the way for admission of our errors? The small, avant-garde theatre in Chelsea, for but a fleeting moment, became one communal confessional box, filling it with hymns and spiritual songs.

As I left The Kitchen (only to return in a few months later to do a collaboration called, ironically, Shangri-La), I felt certain of Jesus’ presence in that room. As the author and fulfillment of that song by Daniel Johnston, He would have invited himself there, as the manifestation of the “unknown, rejected” singer of a worn out tape of old. And there, his “dancing has turned into mourning” (Lamentations 5:15). At that moment, he would certainly have been unguarded, and perhaps as vulnerable as a single monarch flying in the ashes of Sept. 11th.

Makoto Fujimura

*Daniel Johnston was recently featured in a Sundance Film winning documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig (www.thedevilanddanieljohnston.com)

Refractions 14: Cloud Skin

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 14
“Cloud Skin”







I recently visited the town of Imadate, a premier papermaking town in western Japan. As I arrived in the local train station, a freshly fallen snow highlighted the thatched rooves of traditional houses. Nestled in between the mountains of western Japan, the town in Fukui prefecture has an ideal combination of cold, pure water and fibers of mulberry plants and totoro-aoi (a type of hibiscus plant used to facilitate mixing the fibers) to create paper of remarkable strength and durability. Known also as temporary home of where Murasaki-shikibu, the world’s first woman novelist (The Tales of Genji), the town itself seems to still glow with a thousand years of Japanese tradition.

Japanese papers are unique among the world’s papers as layers of paper are woven all together. Papers from other traditions make layers individually and pasted together. This technique of weaving fibers together allowed Heisaburo Hirano in the early twentieth century to create the largest handmade paper available anywhere, almost canvas-like in thickness and strength, called Kumohada Mashi, or “Cloud Skin” paper, I have used paper up to 16 feet square.

Japanese government still uses washi (Japanese hand made paper) and sumi (calligraphy ink) to record their proceedings, because of the paper’s durability. Washi paper is far more durable than canvas because the weavings are tighter, and less air pockets exist. Of course, the vulnerability to puncture is a reality when using paper. But, in a sense, her vulnerability is her strength. Therein lies the essence of Japanese culture and beauty. By weaving fibers of mulberry, hemp and others, these weak materials become most durable and permanent. These papers are also meant to breathe with the surrounding air, the air itself acting as the best cleanser to keep the paper healthy.

The Japanese realized a long time ago that nothing is really permanent. Therefore it is better to respect the aging process, to value creativity over apparent permanence of materials. The age-old concept of wabi (poverty) and sabi (rusting away) insists that what is truly beautiful is not the permanence of things, but the impermanence of things. That a culture is not just the product of culture, but the knowledge of a craft that is passed down from generation to generation.

I was encouraged to see, therefore, that there were many young men and women who had begun to apprentice at the paper-making town. Many had gone to art schools, and learned the art of Nihonga (Japanese style painting), only to realize part of their learning art was to understand fully the process of making paper first hand.

The Japanese government, surprisingly, does not have a system of supporting and funding traditional crafts and art forms. Being on the Council on the N.E.A. has opened my eyes to how we are able to fund many art forms that find their protection in our country. Our National Heritage Awards, given out in the fall of every year, honor those masters of crafts from all over the world. Can it be that America has a better understanding of how we need to protect the world’s cultural forms and voices, because our diversity breeds our interest to shelter traditions? Do we see more objectively, perhaps, having been exiled from our cultures, what makes our own traditions unique and valued? I now find myself trying to convince the Japanese how valuable and beautiful their own culture and tradition are.

What the Japanese do so well, is to develop an art-form in collaboration between nature and art. We can indeed all learn from the Japanese how stewardship of culture is directly related to the stewardship of nature. If, for instance, by pollution and over building we lose the resources that make these fibers, and if the pure mountain streams are tainted, we can no longer sustain papermaking. But the Japanese seemed to have found a vision to take care of their resources well, and by doing so nourishing her tradition and expression. And yet, even here, the tradition lives its tenuous life, with many of the papermakers around the country not being able to continue with their craft. By continuing to use these natural materials, I, too, collaborate with nature. My visit to them was specifically to create a dyed paper that could be used with gold, as in my recently exhibited piece, “Splendor Gold.”

------------------------

I found out recently that the Declaration of Independence is written on the same type of paper as the Kumohada paper I use. Imagine that: our democracy is literally written out on a delicate rag paper. As we pay homage to the signatures that began the great experiment, we might ponder the symbolic significance of the material. The form suits her content: democracy, too, is vulnerable to puncture, like on that beautiful azure day of September 11th. But on the other hand, our democratic ideals are also resilient because it is allowed to breath with the changing air of the times. The strength and durability of democracy are not in the permanence of ideologies, but in the wrestling of ideas in the process of collaboration.

In ecosystem of a democratic culture, like these mountains of western Japan, should allow for diverse cultural expression to thrive in collaboration. This ecosystem is worth sustaining, because it is through these expressions that we will find a common language of longing for beauty and delight in God’s world. As I paced the premise of the paper makers, smelling the sweet aroma of fibers being boiled and stirred, I found myself being stirred in a curious blend of cultural fibers and identities, then woven in layers in situ by master papermakers.

Photo by Makoto Fujimura, A young papermaker at work

Refractions 13: Finding Neverland

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 13
Finding Neverland: Inviting orphans into our theatres
March, 2005





From The Terminal to The Polar Express, old-fashioned innocence is back in Hollywood, winking her magical charm into our lives this year. But this charm seems most evanescent in Miramax’s “Finding Neverland,” which I recently happened to catch en route to Osaka for an exhibit at Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery.

Finding Neverland casts Johnny Depp (John Barrie, as the Scottish playwrite of Peter Pan) and Kate Winslet (dying mother of four children, including Peter) in a tender look at John Barrie’s life and offers a background (apparently fictional) account of the creation of Peter Pan in 1905. It offers rich reflection into the nature of creativity, of an artist’s struggle to incarnate his hopes, and an admirable exploration into the very nature of belief. Neverland is a place, if believed, all can enter into.

Believe in what, you might ask? And these latest Hollywood movies seem to want to convince us to believe in at least something (remember Polar Express, with Santa’s deep and resonant voice?), and the world would be a better place. These movies pit children’s innocent beliefs against our adult cynicism: saying something like “if you don't believe, you can’t really meet Santa or get to Neverland.”

But we may want to reverse that question to ask: “Where does this desire in wanting to believe in belief come from?” And that’s the imaginative landscape Finding Neverland really invites us into. By the way, if you ever doubted Johnny Depp or Kate Winslet’s ability to act with great depth, and incarnate that tension between cynicism and hope in a most serious manner, the movie greatly encourages a new assessment. You see, good art does move us to believe in the possibility of belief, whether in ultimate reality, or wanting simply to have hope in desperate circumstances. One Japanese commentator noted: “Though the actual historical evidence does not line up to the story told, this only goes to show how much a movie, any movie, is suspended belief in movie making itself. Neverland, the movie, is indeed the true Neverland to be believed in.”

John Barrie, in the movie, invites 25 orphans into the theatre for Peter Pan’s opening, with the plays’ financier, played by Dustin Hoffman, becomes irritated, as Berrie has the children sit next to Edwardian arts patrons. It’s the children’s innocent laughter that brings life into initial tense moments, as Peter Pan is unveiled. It’s their wonderment, as they see Peter Pan fly across the stage, that moves the respectable gentlemen to begin to be children once again. Believing, which Barrie insists to be most necessary for the children’s health and growth, must be incarnated into action. Neither this movie nor the character of John Barrie would be convincing apart from his own wrestling with this very question, and actually being torn by the gap between his own vision and the reality of survival, while also experiencing fully the cruelty of death. It’s in that brokenness, that Barrie’s own heart is moved to sacrifice his freedom to commitment, embracing the orphans into his own theatre of life.

The Greek word in the New Testament for “believe” is “pisteuo,” which suggests not belief as a sheer intellectual exercise of having “blind faith”, or to imagine and will us into irrational faith, but belief as a relational axis of trust. Good acting, and good art, moves one to this place of trust. What inspires us, after all, is not being force-fed to believe in belief itself, but to be moved to desire in believing, and exposing our deep need for trust in each other. That pisteuo compels us to a greater sacrifice for each other. Neverland brings us effectively to that place, to create a shelf for such a longing for a greater love. In that place, orphans are always welcomed into our imaginative enterprises, shocking us out of conventional comfort zones.

Now, if a movie can communicate all of this via the10-inch screen of a United flight from Newark to Osaka, and woo this weary traveler to land in Japan with joy and delight, that movie must be deemed successful. The word “entertainment,” after all, originally meant “giving rest to the weary”* or even hosting strangers into your home to nourish them. If Hollywood can begin to truly do this, we would be no worse off than that. It might even feed our orphaned souls, waiting for hope, waiting for Neverland.

Makoto Fujimura
www.makotofujimura.com


*Thanks to Dr. Bill Edgar for this insight.

Photo: from Nagasaki Koi Installation at Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery, Osaka

Refractions 12: A Visual River of Gold

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 12
“A Visual River of Gold”
February, 2005







On a grey February Saturday morning, I headed out to experience the unfurling of the “Gates” installation at Central Park. When I arrived at Columbus Circle, the thousands of orange gates (7500 total) lined up in the walking path, greeting us. Before the unfurling, you could see through the gates like some op-art piece, each rectangle repeating itself, creating a visual echo. Through the winter trees, the skies began to clear, with wispy cirrus clouds highlighting the evanescent sky.

The workers, wearing their grey vests signed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, waited for the first moment of unfurling, all time coordinated with walkie-talkies and visual cues. Watching them work, I realized how much of this project must have been an extraordinary, communal experience. Their excitement and dedication were palpable in how they moved together, stumbling through the details at times, but definite in united hearts and enthusiasm.

Their cries of glee went up as the first of the gates was unfurled, the worker using a long pole to unzip the fabric, with a cardboard tube falling with a thud (the rolls are rather heavy, and they were warning each other to make sure no one got hurt with them). When the first one fell, I was standing but a few feet away, and the tube bounced with a loud bonk, and startled me. But then, these bonks were heard echoing through out the park, a colonnade for a visual feast to begin.

“Wow, just like the drawings…” one of the workers mused as they continued to work along the path.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have done public projects for years, the most memorable ones being the Biscayne Bay, Miami pink surrounding of islands, and the ghostly enveloping of the Reichstag, Berlin. They fund their own projects by selling lithographs and drawings, making sure that the art is free to be enjoyed by the public. These drawings are collage-like, overlapping photographs and charcoal drawings. I have admired them for their connectedness to landscape and city drawings of twentieth century post-war Europe and nineteenth century Hudson River painters. But this morning, I could not but agree that the drawings themselves have the power to create reality before they happen. As part of their artistic vision, they impart expectation for the viewer to collaborate before the project takes place. And the actual, transformative experience is in realization of that suspended belief crucial to their work.

The art of the early 21st Century may be remembered for its collective move from inside of the studio to the outside. Andy Goldworthy, in his Rivers and Tides documentary (now available on DVD), recounts how he began to create his works at the beach on the way to his art classes, and realized that the world is his true “studio.” Christo and Jeanne-Claude certainly paved the way for this paradigm shift. The most significant contribution of their works will be to help all of us believe that the world is the greater and more significant studio or stage, and, more importantly, to see that our own creative vision can directly affect landscapes and cities. As we journeyed through Central Park this February we, too, can collaborate with them with our own desires and dreams. Just like the workers contributed so in synch, we, too, can collaborate with one of the greatest idealists of our time.

I met Christo and Jeanne-Claude at a gallery opening in Ginza, Tokyo during their installation of the umbrellas in Japan. When I complemented him, he insisted on giving credit to his wife, to make sure she was included as an equal partner. Born on the same day (he in Bulgaria and she in Casablanca), and later meeting in Paris, they still live in a walk-up loft in Soho. Their affection for each other and their life-long partnership in creativity seemed rather unusual in the ego-infested, greedy world of art.

They insist on not taking volunteers, but paying them, and for this project they paid for all the police overtime pay. They insist that they do not benefit from the proceeds of the sales of merchandize, desiring that their art be free from the consumer mentality that drives the art world today. An exile from a former Soviet bloc country, Christo seemed always to be a consummate utopian, and Jeanne-Claude his greatest champion. Perhaps the greatest ideal that they uphold is the belief in their partnership in life, and their hope for a pure collaboration and communion with the public.

Christo called this offering “A Visual River of Gold.” I looked up this morning, as I was meditating on this idea of “gates”, that the scriptures use the word “gates” 111 times and “gate” 222 times, so to note their cultural and spiritual significance. Revelation passages speak of many pearly gates, on top of the golden streets of New Jerusalem. The City of God will apparently be a visual river of gold. I am reminded of my mentor Matazo Kayama (see Refractions vol. 3 ) pasting a gold leaf upon a class room window telling us that “good gold, without much silver, is ever so transparent, and true pure gold is liquid.” It’s important to note here that pure gold, as stipulated here in the scriptures, is liquid and not solid. We will be walking through gates, literally walking on a river of gold. In that day, metaphors will be replaced by the density of Reality, the vision of hope unfurled into a true and lasting city. These orange gates, therefore, seem to me to symbolize a cultural and spiritual passage from a solitary life to a community, from devastation to restoration. When Christo and Jeanne-Clalude first imagined the project 26 years ago, Central Park, once so magnificently envisioned by Olmsted and Vaux, was a place of crime infestation and dilapidation. Though, I am sure, the artists will insist that there is no singular purpose attached to the gates, we can surmise that their utopian ideals cannot let one of the greatest miracles of city design, called Central Park, sit idly in devastation.

As the workers passed out swatches of the saffron fabric at the completion of the unfurling to eager partakers of this art-communion, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s utopian ideals sowed seeds of imagination into us all, already to tackle the next project, wherever and whenever that may be.



Makoto Fujimura
www.makotofujimura.com

Photo: taken by Makoto Fujimura, Copyright Christo and Jeanne-Claude 2005

Refractions 11: Surfacing Dolphins

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Vol. 11
January, 2005
Surfacing Dolphins







In sunny Santa Barbara, California last December, I had the pleasure of being invited as a visiting artist at Westmont College. One morning, I got to take a walk along the beach, only a few minutes from a hotel filled with Charlie Chaplin posters. Home of multi-millionaires and legends of the arts (Martha Graham grew up there), it does not take long to get seduced by the blissful scenery. One of the professors at the college told me to look out for dolphins swimming in the morning, and sure enough, a group of them frolicked in the blue grey horizon.


As I began to interact with students in the art department, I began to assimilate into lives of youth and the limitations and potentials of a college environment. As I walked the beach, I began to ponder: “what really is art education?” I had in mind an earlier incident at one of the classes. A professor encouraged students to bring out their best works to show me and very few students seemed bold to volunteer. So I suggested to the students, “Bring out works that you don’t like.” In a few seconds, we had a portfolio of works rejected in student’s minds as unworthy. We may all have a closet full of works that we are not proud of, works that need permission to come out.

We live in a culture of perfection, or at least in the superficial resemblance of things perfect. When we look at ourselves, we are trained by our culture to cover up our imperfections and blemishes. At school, or in business of life, we are driven to compete against others to refine and perfect our art. Yes, we need competition to excel, but if competition does not teach us humility, but only shame, the very business of education can create a culture of death. The best critique I have received in my life came from people who taught me who I was not, not just what I was good at. Failures teach us more than successes. Isn’t education about giving us courage (the root of the word “en-courage”*) to take risks to fail?

James Elkins, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, wrote a book called “Why Art Cannot Be Taught” (University of Illinois Press), in which he comes to three conclusions:

1) The idea of teaching art is irreparably irrational. We do not teach because we do not know when or how we teach.
2) The project of teaching art is confused because we behave as if we were doing something more than teaching technique.
3) It does not make sense to propose programmatic changes in the ways art is taught.

We make assumptions about teaching art, apparently, that are not really justified by the very philosophy we have come to embrace in the art world: do we really have anything to say to each other if every effort to communicate is fragmented, as in Derrida’s labyrinth of languages? What are we pretending to teach, then? Aren’t we sowing more confusion, by pretending to teach while in such a fragmented state?

But as I walked the beach in Santa Barbara, one thing remained perfectly clear to me. As we are drawn to the sun, we will always believe in the significance of the experience of that light. Art depends on the light that reveals our gestures, surface tensions and even fragmentations. Irrational or not, just as the dolphins so predictably visit the bay, we will just as predictably come back to that light via our art. Further, it takes faith to see the significance of each surface movement, it takes faith to teach art, and it takes faith to learn.

Since Westmont is a Christian college, I also began to think about what allows a Biblical worldview to permit us to explore the mystery of each teaching moment. Since I make assumptions that James Elkins chose not make, and assumptions that our pluralistic colleges and universities would not assent to, I realized I was aided by the very “limitations” I have come to embrace. I can assume that such a thing as “teaching” is beneficial, because I have been wooed by this world-view to have faith in the God who communicates, and, as a result, to have faith in communication itself.

Our pluralistic society demands complex communication via various cultures and languages. If you have faith in a Creator that communicated via the pure “media” of stones etched with the Decalogue, you can make assumptions about communication, for instance, that 1) you can indeed speak and be understood, 2) what you hear is mediated by a benevolent mediator and not random echoes of an empty world, and 3) there are laws that govern our relationships and by accepting these boundaries, we communicate better. These presuppositions are what today’s pluralistic society desperately looks for, in order to communicate to each other, but cannot fully embrace. I have learned from scriptures to pay attention to works (in my life) of which I am not proud. They speak to teach us. I have learned that what the ancients calls “repentance” is a journey of coming home to a place where all of our wretched works rest, but also where our wretchedness is overcome by light. That reality can powerfully alter how we view our lives and our art. Even our wretchedness cannot confine us, ultimately, to reaching across boundaries of cultures. But indeed our wretched state may be what draws us together.

But really, you might be asking, isn’t it just your optimism, and not your faith? Aren’t you blind to the reality of our present condition to state such a rosy picture? Perhaps, and it will be optimism, and not faith, if we cannot take failed works and learn from them. Blind optimism cannot truly teach, because of the continuous denial of our failures. Faith is more honest. The honesty reveals our weakness, but, at the same time, points us out of darkness into the light. That’s what scriptures teach us. Scriptures teach us grace. Our world does not.

Take “Sideways,” a movie full of Santa Barbara scenery, for example. It is an ambivalent, brooding impasse of a movie, but with a few poignant moments. The characters play out their frivolities to a typical irreligious fervor noting along the way their obvious cynicism toward life. Just as professor Elkins continued to teach in art schools, despite his cynicism toward teaching, movie makers insists on making movies that celebrate how lost we really are in the light of the California sun. Perhaps a pluralistic society breeds cynicism, or even a false, Sisyphean brand of optimism, because so much needs to be overcome in communicating. Perhaps a “winner” today looks like a cynic celebrating in the light of a false Eden, drinking his pinot noir (all alone). Watching this movie reminds me that acting, as teaching, assumes much based on the zeitgeist swimming about. I can only hope that a college environment can challenge such normative paradigms of the day. We need to create an environment that can encourage even a cynic how to operate in a paradigm of a true, lasting desire, rather than continue to lie our way into fleeting desires. After all, how else can we entertain the presence of dolphins in our lives, playfully swimming in the refracting rays of Santa Barbara?


Makoto Fujimura
www.makotofujimura.com


Recommended reading: Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (Gingko Press)
Read Schuchardt, www.cleave.com His essay “Splendor of a Medium” in my recent catalogue is a gem.
*from a friend/sociologist Tony Carnes

Image: Recent “drawing” from the studio

Refractions 10: Christmas Eve Edition

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions: Vol. 10
Christmas Eve, 2004 Edition
A Beer Toast at Sato Museum, Tokyo




Mr. Harada, the organizer of the “Considering Peace” exhibit last year, surprised me with a suggestion: “How about if we close our exhibit on the 24th, Christmas Eve?”

“Considering Peace” was a benefit exhibit of over 120 artists, mostly from Japan. I initiated this idea as I planned for a Christmas exhibit at Takashimaya Gallery in Tokyo. Mr. Harada was one of my first collectors when I began my career in Japan in the 1980’s. A fire-chief turned cultural entrepreneur, he kindly agreed to become the project’s chair. I and a few other New York and London based artists participated as part of a greater effort called Christmas in Peace. The works were donated and auctioned, and the benefit ended up raising over $36,000 for UNESCO for children in Afghanistan.

Considering that the majority of the artists were not Christians, we decided not to use the word “Christmas” in our titles. Many of us, who were Christians, wanted to, via art, experience Christmas in a new way, by serving others in a foreign city, therefore removing ourselves from the context of over-commercialized frenzy we often find ourselves in. We wanted to “consider peace,” ourselves.

So it came as a surprise to me when Harada san suggested this idea: and I was almost incredulous when he kept on going with his requests. “What if we had candlelight? I mean, isn’t that what you do on a Christmas Eve? Can we sing Christmas songs?” And then he, using very polite, honorific words, asked me. “We would be quite honored if you could speak about the true meaning of Christmas to us.”

Even with the polite culture of Japan, a culture in which they are expected to honor guests from abroad, this request surprised me. But the whole project seemed to take on a life of its own. Artists started to arrive from all over Japan, not just to donate their works, but also to volunteer so that the museum staff would not be overwhelmed. We sensed there was much more than politeness at work.

Earlier that month, Mr. Kei Tatejima, the chief curator of the museum opened the artists’ panel event, introducing the project this way:

“This ‘Considering Peace’ was a collaborative effort bringing together unprecedented efforts from Japan, US and UK. But I want you to know that the idea behind this is not just to raise money, but to celebrate Christmas in a meaningful way.”

Japanese public television came to cover the exhibit, and over 3.5 million viewers were introduced to art works covering the walls of two floors of the museum space. Apparently, an exhibit like this has never been done in a Japanese museum before. So unique was the effort that Mr. Tatejima had to inquire with the governmental officials about the legality of the exhibit. They told him that though it was indeed unprecedented, it was legal to do so within certain guidelines. Then, there was a buzz among curators of other museums and galleries to follow suit. They wanted to know what the guidelines were, so they could do similar exhibits. Many Japanese regional museums sit empty, built during the bubble economy of the late eighties. The funding dried up after the bubble burst, and many museums now have no resources to buy paintings, or even to mount a serious exhibit.

The art world there, just as it is in New York, is in desperate need of a genuine community. If museums could be a place of gathering where artists and the public can come together to work to benefit the world, then even with limited funding, they would benefit us all.

What inspired me most came from the mouths of the artists themselves.

“We do not have a forum to gather like this any more. I find myself all alone in my studio. I realized that I needed a community like this more than I thought.”

“ I did not think that there was anything I can do to affect the world’s grave situation. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I was wrong to think that way.”

We came to serve these artists, and they ended up serving us. They opened their lives and hearts to us, inviting us to their studios and homes. Via a small window of each individual pieces hung, we saw a glimpse into how peacemaking is indeed a creative process. In their sincere effort to participate, and honor us, we had deep and meaningful dialogue that transcended our cultural and political differences. The creation of a “safe space” where we can agree to disagree is crucial in the creation of culture and community. Such a space, filled with the art of hospitality, invites us all to be artists of peace.



So, on Christmas Eve on 2003, artists gathered at Sato Museum in Tokyo. There was quite a sumptuous spread of food. It was the first Christmas Eve party I experienced in which we started the evening with a beer toast. One of the artists arranged to have a huge Christmas cake made for the occasion, and it had Santa on top, skating in a pond of chocolate. After a singer songwriter friend sang Christmas melodies, I shared about what I learned spending my Christmas season in Tokyo.

“A Japanese pastor wrote that the most important message of Christmas is that Jesus was born as a babe, weak and vulnerable to the world. A baby is utterly dependent on a mother and a father, and others helping the baby to survive. Imagine, one who would claim to be the all-powerful Creator in flesh, becoming vulnerable and DEPENDENT on fallen human beings like us!

But when you think about it, a baby’s strength also lies in this weakness, as he or she draws people together. The message of Christmas is a paradox. It is through the weak that power is displayed. It is through the vulnerability, that true lasting security is gained. It is through being utterly dependent on others, that a true community is created.

The message of Christmas, then, can be applied to what we do as artists. What would our art look like if we truly believed that through our weaknesses, through even what we are ashamed of, we could create something that is lasting and meaningful, and incarnate hope back into the world. What if the power of a community is not in the display of power, but in the acknowledgement of our weaknesses? Artists can play an important role in helping a community to be authentic and honest. Japanese aesthetics already embraces the idea that weakness is beautiful: that what is wearing away and what is imperfect actually points to eternity.”




I had my own epiphany last December, while preparing for this project. I began to wonder if Japanese culture intrinsically longs for the true message of Christmas even more than our American culture. Less than 1% of the Japanese claim to be Christians. But, the Japanese traditional culture affirms vulnerability and loss. Japanese poems and paintings from the Heian period (794-1185) are full of sorrow and sadness, and their poetic tradition of “mono-no-aware” can be literally translated “beauty in the pathos of things.” They already recognize that, on this side of eternity, we must see the beauty in an empty cup.

As Americans, we immerse ourselves in our quest for individualism and champion material gains. We parade our “winners” and avoid being seen with the lowly “losers.” We want heroes that are powerful and self-sufficient, and not someone who chooses to be vulnerable. In searching for dominance, we would walk right past that babe in the manger today. In fact, baby Jesus may be the opposite of what we desire as a culture to worship. We are quite undeserving of this gift, but Jesus came to us so willingly. Among the messy, smelly, ordinary stenches, He became the candlelight in our dark, terror filled world. He came knowing that he himself would be snuffed out, betrayed and rejected by winners and losers alike.

Those who celebrate this birth know that this is not the end of the story. Today, when we open this gift of Grace, we are embraced by an eternal mystery. We open a gift of hope that breathes life into us, whispering that death is not the end. Such a message transcends our cultural blindness, and any nationalistic biases.

Christ came so we could fill the empty cup of sorrow with the wine (beer) of community and creativity. Christ came to fulfill a longing for beauty that the Japanese culture is already attuned to.

I was convinced that evening in Tokyo, that Jesus invited himself to be among artists who may not even know His Name (as Jesus is known to host some parties like this in his time). Some of these artists, I suspect, have already sensed his presence in their studios as they labored to create peace via their paintings. All gifts of creativity, like the Magi’s stars, point straight to a stable in Bethlehem.

One artist commented, “I never knew that Christmas Eve could be so meaningful and fun…why aren’t we doing this every year?”

Why indeed.



Christmas, 2004

Makoto Fujimura


http://www.christmasinpeace.net
http://www.cihope.net


Image: Akiko Urakawa, “The Vine”, from Considering Peace Benefit Exhibit