"Like and Ethereal Transfer" was the first body of Fukawa's work to confront autism head-on. The 1995 one-man exhibition at Grand Arts in Kansas City had as its focus four puddle-shaped marble pieces deeply engraved with text letters filled with mercury. The text passages were from the writings of Birger Sellin, a 24-year-old German man who has suffered all his life from severe autism. At the age of eighteen, with someone supporting his arm, Sellin began to type with one finger.It was the first time in his life he'd been able to communicate coherently with anyone, including his mother. Much of what he revealed of his inner world is published in the 1993 book, I don't want to be inside me anymore: Messages from an Autistic Mind. The revelations are excruciatingly painful. Those close to him must sometimes wish they'd never asked.Because Fukawa is both a father and an artist he can't stop asking. Adrift in the Sea of Tranquility - a single, multi-part work - continues his exploration of autism.The subject here not his son Fumi, but a slightly older girl named Erika whom Fukawa describes as "deeply autistic." Fukawa met Erika in the early 90's when he and the girl's mother, Eri Hanaoka, were part of a group working collectively to understand and aid their children with disabilities.
The centerpiece of Adrift in the Sea of Tranquility is a headless female figure, approximately 16-feet high. The torso is a human-scale dressmaker's form, cast in bronze.Embedded in the breast of the torso is a tiny video monitor, with a looped recording Fukawa made of Erika as she interacted with her mother. The torso sits atop an enormous metal wire cage that billows out like a hoop skirt.The figure rotates slowly, almost imperceptibly, one revolution every 15 minutes.
Ten pairs of steel stanchions are placed randomly in the vast space surrounding the central form.Each pair supports a string, and clinging to each string is a small battery-powered, cable car. Emitting subtle, struggling noises, the toy cars inch along the strings until they reach the ends and bump into the metal supports. Then they stop with a shudder, reverse, and begin their pointless traverse in the opposite direction.
Radiating from the torso's neck to the gallery's four walls are 40 pairs of speaker wires. The tent-like array of golden wire glints in fragments of sunlight and, like an enormous, near-transparent wedding veil, graces the space with a reverent, religious aura.Suspended from these wires at ear height are small, uncased, round speakers, spaced equidistant, 10 to a wall. The speakers carry a quiet reading of a dialog between Fukawa and Hanaoka. Each ratchet of the central form's rotation trips the amplifier signal from one set of speaker wires to another, causingpieces of this dialog to lurch unpredictably around the room.
