As an artist I am interested in sharing the introspective moments of everyday life with viewers. My work explores the internal dialogue and duality in the relationship between a person's public and private lives. The experiment focuses on how art can reflect the personal life experiences that we usually don't share with anyone else.
For example, once in a while, during the course of an everyday activity, we may encounter an incredible moment of truth, an epiphany. However, this moment may be too profound to keep in our mind, because our daily activity overtakes our attention and we either forget about the moment or put it far deep inside our brain cells where it resides without ever having been verbalized. This profound moment, then, never has the chance to rest in our memory as both thought and speech. It rests there only as intimation.
Art, then, can become a vehicle to rescue this profound insight from the deepest recesses of our memory. My installations, in particular, are artworks that are intended to function like an entrance way for this rescue mission: a trip that may be like a road through another Alice's wonderland.
In teaching, studio art concerns not only artmaking, but also students' figuring out their own way to look at themselves. The development of digital technologies in the past ten years has wiped traditional artistic boundaries away. As a result, instead of creating specialists, it is now necessary to educate students to have a broader and more prospective vision of humanity. Thus, studying art leads to studying your own culture. Art must be an alternative process finding a way to perceive our everyday life.
This process is unlike that approach to teaching in which everything has an expected answer. Our questions have no specific or right answers. Rather, there are many answers and even perhaps no right or correct ones. Teaching in this approach is not an easy task because the process involves a lot of invisible, conceptual and time-consuming work. This teaching is unlike introducing technical practice to students where repetition alone leads to proficiency. Here the student and the teacher are involved in a thinking process that propels us to take steps. If either one stops this process, it is over. The highest priority is for students to learn how to educate themselves as artists.
My assignments are usually very tight and restricted at the start, but eventually they become open-ended. Students are encouraged to think and to find their own direction using the assignment as a guideline. This allows students to explore their imagination and allows me to teach them how to clarify their own ideas and to practice conceptual building skills. Students are then able to search among a variety of solutions to one assignment. I eventually get many different types of work that respond to the assignment.
In a group critique, before an artist is allowed to talk about his/her own work, we examine that piece and how it has come to its present form. This helps us in two ways. First, we are able to talk about what we are looking at without any prejudice or bias from the artist. Second, we can train the eye to look at art and to articulate and discuss it in depth. In turn, the artist is able to learn both what the artwork communicates and how other people perceive the artwork.
It is important to expose students to contemporary art and art theories that lead them to learn and develop their own artistic vocabulary in the context of the current critical art world. In my classes, I introduce alternative ways of thinking through research projects, reading and writing assignments, student presentations and group discussion. Additionally, I encourage students to apply for artistic opportunities outside of school, by giving them information and by helping them edit their statements and proposals. A logical thought leads to clear communication, and an intuitive leap allows one to explore an unknown path. Both of these steps are important. The physical process of making art can be one of the most enjoyable activities. I believe that a great piece always maintains a fine balance among intellectual, intuitive, and physical processes.
Hirokazu Fukawa
