Water Flames and Zero Summer Exhibit at the Katzen

Zero Summer (above image, 66x88", gold and silver on Kumohada) and several of Water Flames paintings will be traveling to Washington D.C. this summer, and the opening is May 20th, from 6-9pm. The Katzen Center is a spectacular new museum inside American University arts center, and is located at 4400 Massachusetts Ave, NW (203-885-1300) www.american.edu/museum

The exhibit will continue until August 20th. I hope to see you at the opening!

For a review of Water Flames series, go to http://nyartsmagazine.com/pages/nyam_document.php?nid=1279&did=3021

Makoto Fujimura

Refractions Vol. 20: The Housewife that Could

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 20
“The Housewife that Could: Jane Jacobs of 555 Hudson Street, Greenwich Village”
May, 2006



"Designing a dream city is easy," she concluded. "Rebuilding a living one takes imagination." Jane Jacobs, (New York Times, April 26th 2006)


Jane Jacobs passed away a few days ago at the age of 89 in a Toronto Hospital. A day later, there were several flowers placed in front of 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, with a note, "From this house, in 1961, a housewife changed the world."


I had lunch with sociologist Tony Carnes across from 555 Hudson Street last February, after a worship service at my church The Village Church on 11th Street. We were in a Chinese Restaurant across from this very site, looking across to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. “You know Jane Jacobs lived here, right?” If there’s anything I have learned here in New York City is that you want to listen to an urban sociologist. What is so significant about Jane Jacobs? Well, according to Tony, and many others, she is the mother of a movement called New Urbanism, and yes, she happened to save Greenwich Village and changed the world, standing up against behemoth of highway construction, and against one of the most powerful men to control the destiny of New York, Robert Moses. Moses, who began his illustrious career by designing the Worlds Fair of 1939, is attributed with single handedly creating the suburbia of Long Island (and the development of suburbia in general) and the birth of car culture. He was so successful that it seemed no one stood against him in power and influence.


In 1961, Robert Moses met his match. During a hearing at which he announced his plans to open a highway into Washington Square and through Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs and several housewives stormed the hearing. Moses was irate, saying, "There is nobody against this—NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY, but a bunch of, a bunch of MOTHERS!” (http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs.htm)

Today, many attribute Jacobs with having defeated Moses, in this modern version of David and Goliath. New Urbanist James Howard Kunstler writes:

One can say pretty definitively that she won the battle and the war, though the enormous inertia of American culture still acts as a drag on a genuine civic revival here. By the mid 1960s, her interests and writings broadened to take in the wider issues of economics and social relations, and by force of intellect she compelled the cultural elite to take seriously this untrained female generalist -- and wonderful prose stylist -- who had the nerve to work out large ideas on her own. Naturally, her books are now part of the curriculum.

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs.htm

Jane Jacobs wrote a book called 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' as she and her housewife friends battled Robert Moses. The book became a foundational text for those who challenged the conventional notion of urban growth and progress. She argued for diversity of close-knit streets and buildings, and for dense populations to increase commerce and community at the same time, an urban concoction that even provides safety. Suburbia, a legacy of Moses, would, by contrast, pretend to provide safety and protection, but, according to Jacobs, ultimately isolate and dehumanize. She is often asked if her ideas came about by hanging out with intellectuals at White Horse Tavern. No, she would answer, I could not afford to go there. She merely could observe, with her curious eyes roaming the streets of Greenwich Village from her window, the intricacies of street life, both ugly and beautiful. What she saw there, though, was not a scene of destruction filled with gangs and prostitutes. What she saw was a city life teeming with dialogue, neighborly attention and fermenting vibrant cultural mix that would fight the dehumanizing elements of our increasingly segmented modern culture. More importantly, she imagined a better city, as her motherly gaze looked over her streets as she wrote, and as she raised her children.

You might question…Safety? How could the chaos and brokenness of city life provide safety? Jacobs’ answer would be something like this: it would be difficult for a Columbine High School-type incident to break out in one of NYC’s schools today, however dangerous and tenuous the dilapidated schools can be. City life limits crime simply because there are more eyes to keep watch. And besides, it would be very, very difficult for my teenage boys to hide a cache of automatic weapons in their 100 square foot bedroom. Urbanity forces us to be dependent on each other and deal with our neighbors. Urbanity forces us out of our comfort zones and may even expose our dark, sinister plans.

Besides, do we not question today Moses’ insistent vision for “progress” and the expansion of highways, as we max out our credit cards purchasing gasoline in our four-dollar-a-gallon culture? Should we not pause to listen to a housewife named Jane Jacobs?

I became involved in this dialogue over the legacy of Robert Moses verses Jane Jacobs when IAM invited Jonathan Bradford of Grand Rapids, Michigan to speak here in New York City a year ago (hear free podcast on IAMNY.org in a week or so) As I volunteer on the National Council on the Arts, and get to know the NEA design director Jeff Speck, who is, as an urban design expert, overseeing the Mayor’s Institute, I am constantly reminded of the power of design to directly affect our quality of life. In this arena of New Urbanism, arts do overlap, literally, with our lives. Our cities are our artwork, and her designs can either make us more human or less human. Whether one agrees with the pro-growth model of Moses or the organic vision of Jacobs, this imaginative battle of how we are to see our cities continues today.

As I walked with my soon-to-be teenage daughter on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village recently, I had to give a nod to Jane Jacobs’ instincts. Bleecker Street is today the most sought after cultural nexus and originator of new commerce, far more influential, in my view, than the hyper commerce sites like Columbus Circle mall. Why would fashion designers like Marc Jacobs seek out tiny spaces on Bleecker St? Why would Saturday Night Live comedians celebrate Magnolia Bakery, also on Bleecker St., with their ode to the Chronicles of Narnia (one of the most sought after pod-cast videos on I-Tunes)? Why would Japanese magazines feature stores on Bleecker St. to the extent that if you walk on Bleecker in early May, Japan’s Golden Week holidays, you would think it’s a street in Shibuya, Tokyo, filled with so many Japanese? Where would my creative second son, C.J., go to get his left handed acoustic guitar? (Matt Umanov on Bleecker…because “they have guitars that really sing.”) And where can you run into, seemingly every time I walk on Bleecker, a friendly pastor of a storefront church, appropriately named the Neighborhood Church (next to Matt Umanov)? And most importantly for that beautiful spring day, where do you find gifts for a friend’s birthday, especially for a twelve year-old Lydia that cannot be bought anywhere else? Bleecker St.

Jane Jacobs was right. The city is best when buildings are diverse and small, where we can enjoy diversity of class, backgrounds and ages, mingling together in compressed streets. Today, such an environment is so needed, and endangered; it is fast becoming a destination site for tourism, as well as a place of commerce and a family friendly despite the high rent. Whether one agrees with Jacobs’ many irascible perspectives (and she was prolific in that, as well), she did forge a context for how a creative city can be imagined. Today, whatever is done around America in favor of creative neighborhoods, we all owe a nod of thanks to Jacobs.


It is noted that when Jane Jacobs would do her dishes or walked about the local streets one would hear her audibly debate with Thomas Jefferson, and, as a second alternative, Ben Franklin. This exercise was not a joke to her, but a serious interplay among generalists of equal statures across the schism of centuries, navigating the complex pluralism of our time. Similarly, anyone today walking about New York City, or any other urban mazes of the day, would need to, and want to, hold debates (and perhaps wash dishes, too) with Jane Jacobs, a determined housewife imagining a better city with her Remington typewriter. Feisty and irreplaceable, the sound of her typing echoes in our neighborly streets, refracting the dense, fiery heart of our humanity.

I am glad Jane Jacobs won the battle to save Greenwich Village.

Refractions Volume 19: Fra Angelico and the Five Hundred Year Question

It all started again when I visited the Fra Angelico (1395-1455) exhibit at the Met last December*.

Behind the splendor of the Christmas cresche, I entered the back hall of the Met. Surprisingly, there was no line (as opposed to the van Gogh drawing exhibit – 45 minutes). But there was a hushed gathering of many, moving about in the darkly lit halls.

I entered the halls and the golden aura of a diminutive Virgin Mary painting greeted me, with her azurite robe, and the Christ child’s supple body, reflecting her humanity -- a simple work full of weighty colors. Then I had to close my eyes, after a few seconds of pondering the saturated surface. I realized this was too much to behold, all at once. As I staggered about looking for a blank wall to stare at, almost feeling ashamed to be in the presence of such greatness, I had a “500 year” question pop up in my mind.

What is the five hundred year question? Well, it’s a historical look at the reality of our cultures, and asking what ideas, what art, what vision affects humanity for over five hundred years. It’s the opposite of the Warholian “15 seconds of fame.”

Contemporary art does not encourage such thoughts. Except for a few notable exceptions, like video guru Bill Viola or the minimal zen of Agnes Martin, contemporary artists want to compress time, rather than stretch time. We are immersed in a visual culture that squeezes life into 15 second commercials with instant gains. Chelsea galleries are full of art that screams for attention, as if to say they are the twenty first century version of Willy Loman. “Attention, Attention must be paid to such an art,” gallerists dressed in their designer fashion calls out. Rather than profundity, they pine after instant recognition and fame. Just like Willy, we peddle our goods to find significance and survival, all the more as the grey world all around us passes by.

Meanwhile, artists who labor to develop their craft, artists who are committed to a longer view of their art, suffer. I can name many mid-career artists, in their 50’s who deserve much attention, but galleries do not pay attention to them, and give fresh-out-of-art-school artists solo exhibits. But of course, they are replaced the next year by the next round of twenty year olds.

Nothing wrong with twenty year olds, by the way: Fra Angelico was one, but that’s the year he entered the Dominican order. That’s where his gift was discovered, in the long lasting tradition of art. He was trained as an apprentice, and his first notable piece was a visual echo of Lorenzo Monaco, which suggests that he studied under him.

If Fra Angelico was born today, he would have a hard time finding anyone to teach him their craft, to be apprenticed, let alone to join an Order. The church would not be the first place a creative genius would look for to be trained in art. That statement alone reveals how much Christians have abdicated our responsibility to steward culture.

If you spoke with people staggering about in the Met with me, having a similar reaction to looking at the glory of Fra Angelico’s paintings, you may find them to be Enlightened secularists who also grieve today over the fragmentation, the loss of a spiritual anchor in the contemporary art scene. They may be even atheists who by the very essence of their denial may have to appreciate the sheer weighty anchor of Fra Angelico paintings. Atheism demands a language of belief to wrestle against. Fra Angelico’s paintings are undeniably Christian to the core. Enlightened secularists would be staggering because the spirit has left them. Atheists stagger because they have lost the defining opposition. I stagger and grieve because, as a Christian, I realize I do not see anyone on the horizon who could create and paint today who would rival Fra Angelico’s angelic weight.

In short, we are all staggering about, or should be…those who have eyes to see. That is precisely how we should react to Fra Angelico and the five hundred year question. We stagger because we have lost even our ability to ask that question.

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



So I took the subway home and I Googled “1500” :

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001221.html

The Tudors ruled the early Renaissance, having ended the War of the Roses in 1484. In 1503, da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo created David. Not a bad start. The Sistine Chapel, and The Last Supper, of course, would follow.

Christopher Columbus was sailing to sites unknown, trying again to get to Asia. Magellan noted the global shape of the earth. Martin Luther posted his 95 thesis on the Wittenberg door (1517). And very significant for me, Tohaku Hasegawa, the Michelangelo of Japan, was born (1537).

I closed my eyes again, and the angels of Fra Angelico re-invited themselves in.

Would we see another Renaissance in the days to come? Would we have another chance to steward our culture, without losing our identity and faith in the process?

You might be saying “gee, how can we think about 500 years from now if we have the capacity to blow ourselves up a thousand time over…aren’t you being a bit optimistic?”

Recently, I had a conversation with a Japanese art student. She asked me “How can you paint if you know that you may not be around ten years from now?” The look on her face told me that she was deadly serious. Japanese youth grow up, apparently, with the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after all these years.

So I guided her to the ages that led up to 1500’s, and I shared with her about the period of world history in which Fra Angelico painted.

It was not a cozy time in history. The stenches of Black Death hovered all over Europe and Asia. Remember that the plague killed a half, yes a half, of the population in Europe. The swords of assassination were drawn (striking the Dukes of Surrey and Exeter, and then the Earls of Kent, Huntington and Salisbury for Richard II ), the church was in turmoil (two Popes resigning, and one being excommunicated in the span of four years). The Ottoman Empire invaded Constantinople, ending the Byzantine age, through Muslim invasion. No, it was not an age to have hope, or to think of the next five hundred years. In fact, the list of events seems to have remarkable echoes of our times (the first entry of the following web site is Baghdad being “sacked” -- http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=15th+century&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1&linktext=15th%20century)

So how did Fra Anglico manage to paint these indelible images? Perhaps the more pertinent question is: “To what hope did he cling to in such a dark time?”

After my third visit to the Fra Angelico exhibit, I allowed myself to drink deeply of that hope. It is not only the hope of an individual genius, but also of patronage, of society and the church. Then I realized, in order to create today, in fact, in order to live today, I desperately needed Fra Angelico in my imagination: when the Angelic faces would fill my heart as I pondered Aquinas in my mind. I would consider the life of St. Francis (who appears over and over in the Met exhibit), the saint/artist of two centuries past who ushered in the resplendence of the Renaissance via his humanity, re-gifting creativity and theatre back into theology. I wondered if, had I painted with Fra Angelico, I would hear about the dangerous teenage heretic in France named Joan of Arc (executed 1436). Perhaps then, I would turn to the last panel of my own “The Last Judgment”, and paint her face (secretly) as she danced up the stairs of heaven, her rich cinnabar robe with golden calligraphy, a design fit for a Queen. (http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Fra_Angelico/images.asp)

Can such Eternity refract through our earthly visions? Can my children’s world birth generations of geniuses, as did Fra Angelico’s heirs, whose splendors would fill the Earth, as well as Heaven?


Makoto Fujimura

Other links:

http://www.mercatornet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=220




*Actually, the seed of the 500-year idea was planted deeply in my heart when James Romaine, an art historian, and I were speaking soon after 9/11. “This is a once in a life time moment in our history: it could even be once in a five hundred year moment.”



Image: Azurite Light, 2006, 30x30"

A.R.T. Introduction

Image by Pamela Moore, "128 Cooper B"


Dear Refraction Readers:

For the upcoming International Arts Conference’s 15th year anniversary conference, “Artist as Reconcilers,” I am preparing the following series of essays about art called “A.R.T.: Awareness, Reconciliation and Transformation”. Here is my introduction section. The whole content of “A.R.T.” will be initially be available to IAM members only, so if you are interested please join IAM membership ($40 annual) via www.iamny.org (go to the conference section).

I will continue with my Refraction essays, free for all, again in March.

Makoto Fujimura


What is A.R.T.?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
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.

Little Gidding, The Four Quartets

About A.R.T. (Awareness, Reconciliation and Transformation)

Introduction:

I write this in order to encourage artists and to help facilitators of the arts understand their role in cultural stewardship. While About A.R.T. is an effort to broadly describe what Art is, it is not by any means a complete definition. I am drawing upon my own experience as an artist and what I find myself teaching to others. I do believe that these principles are helpful to understand the role of creativity in our lives, and to contextualize our creative activities in society. I am ultimately interested in a dialogue that move toward a stewardship of creative gifts, and how we may as a society see artistic roles, and creativity in general.

I also write here to begin a dialogue among church leaders and Christians who desire to understand the arts. While this dialogue is not directed only to a Christian audience, I do speak and write as one, with all of the worldview assumptions attached to that pre-supposition. I make this premise because in all of the recent effort to define the importance of the arts, and critique of art and arts education, I have noticed writers such as John Carey (“What Good Are the Arts?") and James Elkins (“A Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art”) specifically describing their worldview as strictly secular. I find their discussions helpful, although I find that presupposition often breaks down in their own turfs as their ideas evolve, and they may not be as consistent in their worldviews as I am trying to be for mine. Nevertheless, I do think it is important to start out with a premise. I am not a secularist, so I have certain presuppositions that frame my discussions. I do believe that creativity is a gift of the Creator. And because of my theological framework, I believe that such a view of the arts will produce more diversity, more content and more color to all of the arts, Christian or not. We are created to be creative: and we have stewardship responsibilities that come with that gift. The more we find fittingness in the God given responsibility, the more freedom we will find in our expression.

It has been noted that we have entered the Creative Age. The Information Age, for us Americans and other non third-world countries, is over. India and China, and other countries have taken over the role of dispersing technology and executing productions: the only resource that we have that cannot be outsourced is our creativity. Thus, we are at a crucial moment in history in which we are witnessing a paradigm shift in culture, a shift that may be as significant as Gutenburg’s invention of printing. Just as the invention of prints caused many shifts in cultural values, the Creative Age, with her accompanying technologies, will usher in principles that formerly were considered unimportant for the everyday needs of the society. Some have called this time “post-Human” as our boundaries of creativity begins to have serious ethical and moral boundaries. Before Modernism, artists depicted flowers as flowers, asking “How do you depict a flower?” Modernism asked “What is a flower?” and Post Modernism followed with “Is there a flower at all?” And in post-Human time we ask, “Can humans combine their DNA with a flower?” In other words, we are at a point in which what we create and what we imagine will not merely be virtual, but are actualized into reality, and quite possibly, into our DNA.

If Gutenburg brought books to us, this age brings CG technology, virtual realities, and DNA manipulation. So do we study the sciences to find answers and guide our path? The sciences cannot reach into the supernatural, nor into the mysteries of our realities, because they are bound by natural, measurable data. Art on the other hand should and can reach into the very heart of existential mysteries sciences cannot tackle. But we need to have a clear understanding of how art functions, in order to begin to understand this role. Art of the past, it seems to me, is a great place to calibrate our place in history, and press our existential marker into the shifting tide of culture.

Some have moved away from the study of the classical and traditional in favor of erasing boundaries of the past. But we have found ourselves anchorless, without any agreed upon boundaries at all, ever so fearful of the future as a result. I believe that what we can learn from Rembrandts and Shakespeares of the world is even more significant today because they give us hope in turmoil, and therefore give us a picture of mediation to this age, in the power of technology today. The sciences and technology need this trans-historical dialogue on the arts, because arts determine our cultural values, and determine what the culture sees as beautiful and true.

Recently I spent some time visiting friends who work as insiders in Hollywood. There is a significant effort, I found, among the industry experts to create a more principled way to develop creative content, movies and the new media. After the success of Lord of the Rings, and now Narnia, we desire for more Lewises and Tolkiens to come out. These creative resources are not birthed out of a vacuum, but over generations of commitment to nurture and value creativity. The church has been mostly reluctant to take the lead in cultural production, fearful that those who enter Babylon will come out tainted by her, unable to speak for her values. And since there is still a vacuum in culture that the church abdicated to general culture, even if we desire more Tolkiens and Lewis, the church, in her present status, will be the first to reject them as misfits.

In order to have meaningful dialogue in this condition, we Christians must reevaluate our definition of creativity and art. On one hand, Biblical literalists and separatists (such as the “Left Behind” authors) may insist on that all of what is discussed in art must be literal interpretation of Christian stories, an approach which forbids certain art to exist at all. On the other we have secular purists who desire art to be left alone to the “good” desires of our hearts, self reliant and (in most cases) necessarily alienated from society. My approach in A.R.T. is neither of these routes. In order to lead, and teach our children to lead, Twenty First Century with creativity, we must speak in to our culture to value art and steward her with proper boundaries, and lead with a sense of responsibility. At the same time, we must realize that art is neither a mere tool to be used for ours or other ideologies. A.R.T. must ask deeper questions: what I have began to call “a five hundred year questions.” What we create matters: all art products cast their vision of what the artist consciously or unconsciously desire for the world to become. We are, and will become, what we imagine: and if we do not understand both the power and the danger of our imaginative powers, we will not begin to birth meaningful, and hopeful works of inspiration.

Makoto Fujimura

Next chapter, “Awareness,” will be released after the conference for members only.

Image: Pamela Moore, "128 Cooper B", mixed media on paper, 30x36 inches Please go to www.fujimuracontemporary.com for more information on this painting

Refractions Volume 18: How the Beast Stole Christmas

How the Beast Stole Christmas
Could King Kong be a better film than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?


It is said that J.R.R. Tolkien disliked the Narnia stories, written by his closest literary comrade, C.S. Lewis. He found them to be a "a hodgepodge of myths.” This December, two films vie for a permanent place in our imaginative landscapes, offering two distinct visions for moviemaking. We should not be surprised that Lewis’ Narnia story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so faithfully translated by a Disney team, is pitted against King Kong, a passionate offering by a director who so triumphantly translated, and transformed, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Narnia was a good film: but not a great film. King Kong is the better film -- And quite possibly a great film.


Don’t get me wrong. Georgie Henley, whose debut makes an indelible mark in the Narnia movie, playing Lucy, deserves much praise and recognition (the Academy Awards should create a new category – call it, let’s say, the Drew Barrymore E.T. Phone Home Award for the most iconic child actor of the year). Narnia should be seen by all of us if only to witness the light of Narnia wonderment refracted in Lucy’s face, and truly magical wardrobe scenes. The movie came out, to the relief of many Narnia fanatics, very much faithful to the text and imagery of C.S. Lewis. The depiction of the White Witch captured the intensity of conflicts, both spiritual and physical, and her cold stealthy fingers of evil were felt reaching into our hearts. And the twist in the end can unlock a mystery of redemption that we long to understand and describe as Christians.

But it’s the depiction of the beast that gave pause.

Can you really compare Aslan the lion, the Christ figure of Narnia with King Kong? You might ask. Isn’t Narnia the most redemptive, Christ-focused work on the screen today? And don’t you want any ventures related to the writings of C.S. Lewis (a writer I deeply love) to succeed?

Yes, no, and definitely yes.

We can, and need to, compare the two beasts, because the movies beckon us to do so. While the original text of Narnia is most redemptive, the movie pales in comparison: and I venture to say that Kong somehow manages to create a need for redemption better than Narnia as a film. Yes, I do want anything associated with our beloved don of Oxford to succeed. But, I came away convinced that Peter Jackson’s King Kong delivers the beastly quality best, while Disney’s Aslan felt tame and not the fierce Lion/King of Lewis’ original Aslan. Therefore Narnia’s redemptive quality suffered. I wonder if Lewis himself would have agreed: after all Lewis was "absolutely opposed" to a live-action version of "Narnia." (“according to an unpublished 1959 letter he wrote to a BBC producer. ‘Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare,’” (http://www.classical1035.com/index.php?sid=324631&nid=65&template=story_print))


In King Kong, we witness the transformation of the Beast to glimpse love and to experience beauty. We see the Beast be destroyed because of, and in spite of, that response. This transaction is deeply truthful, and even Biblical. He convinces us of the lack of a way out of that beastly existence. Romans chapter eight of the New Testament tells us “the creation was subjected to frustration…in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:20,21). Kong exactly captures this frustration. And in that gap between what may be possible and what is actually not, Christians can see our need to appear on the scene as children of God: we are to be Princes and Princesses of the great King. Narnia could have told this royal appearance most powerfully in the cinema, not just as a mandatory Star Wars like last scene, but as a layered character development that evolves over the course of the film. It is after all, a story of children who are literally destined for thrones. Psychological elements, the inner tension between the weight of the call and the actualization of that call, could have been explored much deeply.

Kong became truly dangerous and remained untamed even until the end. Andy Serkis, who “played” Kong deserves an Oscar (again, let’s create a new category – maybe name it after him, the Serkis Award for the best acting-via-CG. There are sure to be many more given in the future.) His depiction, his movement breathes life into a previously undeveloped beast as a tragic hero. After initiating us in incomparable Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to how technology can morph the art of acting as we know it, he follows the same uncharted beastly path in Kong. His depiction of emotional depth and range of a wild monster turned to sacrificial protector is utterly unrivaled in modern cinema, excepting, possibly in a much smaller way this year, Gromit the claymation dog by Nick Park in Wallace and Gromit: the Curse of the Were Rabbit.

And then there’s the Empire State Building. I may love King Kong simply because New York City, wearing her 1932 Art Deco gown in the midst of The Depression, appears in the film as a central character, as important as any other actors, with the freshly built Empire State as her crown. From the misty East River to Times Square’s snowy theatre district, King Kong shows the city as wild as Skull Island, but also romantic and dreamy, and certainly much more dangerous than dinosaurs and poisonous spiders. The movie captures the monstrous power and sophistication of the City to make a plaything, a mere spectacle, out of a pure beauty called Ann Darrow, who is just as much of a misfit in NYC as a savage 50 foot beast.

Just as in this year’s Pride and Prejudice (another highly recommended film to see) a pure range of emotions of romance is explored without pandering to cheap, sensationalistic sex scenes. Compassion, to see beyond the veneer of our beastly existence, defines Naomi Watts’ performance. And Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) is seen mirroring his complex emotional connection in his act of creativity as a playwrite. In Skull Island, he is a “dare- to–save the girl” triathlon hero and not very credible (I certainly do not know many playwrites who can move that fast). But back in the NYC theatre, revelation he has, echoed in his own play, was one of the most important moments of the film. There is a great overlap between the dashed hopes of an imaginative, creative soul and the falling Ape. Both face an incomparable Empire State building and must climb to the top. And romance has everything to do with it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1939:

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood—everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits – from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.


A year before his death, the beast of the literary world stood on top of the Empire State building and saw his own limitations. He saw the world crumble down, including his love for his beloved wife Zelda. Kong, in the same way, represents not just a beast, but a “Heart of Darkness,” (Joseph Conrad’s novel of African journey is often quoted both explicitly and implicitly in the film). And the tale is about our darkened hearts, and our Pandora’s box opened. We struggle to retain the wilderness, or fail to tame it. That’s why romances in our lives either destroy us or ultimately fail to satisfy us. Therefore, Kong was seen as a necessary villain residing deep within our hearts, a victim of our dark presumption. In the climactic scene of the movie, in a “Christina’s World” like stretch, the body of Naomi Watts reaches into the beast’s eyes of surrender. On top of the world, the beauty is held together still, for but one single moment, with the beast.

This beast truly proved dangerous, and beautiful at the same time: the way Aslan should have been. Kong stood on top of the Empire State and roared against the incoming fighter planes and even against his own death: Aslan’s willingness to suffer and be sacrificed for the betrayal of Edmund could have been equally as compelling visually, but it was not.

Lewis stated in Mere Christianity about Beauty and the Beast “The girl, you remember, had to marry a monster for some reason. And she did. She kissed it as if it were a man. And then, much to her relief, it really turned into a man and all went well…” He continues in the essay to woo us to realize that these stories of old are really a means for us to tap into the great, deep longing of our hearts, and our need for the gospel, the Good News of Christ. It is that suspense we wish for, what we deeply desire that is captured in Kong: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe needed to capture that better than it did.

It may be that Narnia was so wedded to the original text that it lost some of its mythic power. The Chronicles of Narnia is indeed a great story (and especially to read aloud to our children): and it does not need to be a film to add to its integrity. If the film makes us re-read these great stories, to appreciate Lewis’ myth-filled imagination, so be it. They may have seemed a “hodgepodge” to Tolkien, but to us in this age of uncertain fears, they are more like color-filled lights refracted in Lewis’ multi-faceted prism, filling our hearts with secure hope.

On the other hand, King Kong has to be a film. There’s no other way to communicate this beauty and beast visual drama. It’s a film that needs to be a film: that’s why it can be a great film.

Finally, it’s Peter Jackson’s love for movie making that prevails. He clearly believes in the art form called film: And he loves it deeply as a myth-making medium. It is that love for the medium that convinces us of a movie as not a mere translation, but as a transformational piece. Narnia is a faithful translation with a few magical moments. But it did not, ultimately, transform the text (that would require much more freedom to the movie makers). Kong transformed the tradition of movie making as an art form. He thoroughly explores that potential to the extent that some have complained on the time length of the Kong movie: to that I say… Narnia should have been at least three hours as well! See, Peter Jackson knew that the story was worth our time – such great stories of transformation take time to steep in our hearts.


Image: Scott Kolbo, "Faster Couple," Intaglio print, 20"x8", used by permission

World Magazine

I came home from Japan with my email box full of congratulations on my being selected as World Magazine's "Daniel of the Year". Since I was quite unaware of this (they told me only that they had been working on a story on me...), it came as quite a surprise, and made me think of the real Daniel that they named the honor after. Daniel is the biblical hero who interpreted dreams for the King of Babylon, was interrogated and thrown into the lion's den but not harmed. He was full of faith, a young man "without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace." (Daniel 1:4) He could interpret dreams. I am not so sure if I am worthy of such a comparison, but if this honor means that our friends in Christian circles are more and more aware of the vast importance of the arts in our lives and faith, I do accept, humbly knowing that there are many (some of whom I have spent time with in Japan and Washington D.C. in this trip) who labor for Christ without any fanfare or a deserved applause.

Here's the article...

http://worldmag.com/subscriber/default.cfm?issue_id=5085

I have always written Refractions knowing that many of the readers live outside of the cultural range of a Christian church. I hope you will continue to find this to be a listening post for my musings on travels, art and faith.

Daniel proclaimed to the King:

“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are his. He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him."

May your holiday season be full of refractions of this light.

Thanks

Makoto Fujimura

Image: from a Collaborative performance in Tokyo

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