Hirokazu Fukawa is involved in what many contemporary artists would regard as a dangerous experiment. He's making highly formalized fine art about a seeminglyirresolvable problem in his own life.

For years his sculpture has incorporated words and these words have always beenabout isolation and about a desperate desire to communicate. "Your are the first skin around me." "I Want to Feel the Way You Do, All the Time..." " I love you madly." "You are the only real truth I know." "Love me in your full being." "Forgive me/Forget me." In a 1994 installation at Carnegie Mellon University, Fukawa built a stairway and sandblasted into its glass steps the words of Soviet astronaut Aleksei Lenov, who, reflecting on the experience of walking in space, said, "It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body."

These issues ofhuman separateness and loneliness were embedded in Fukawa's work before the birth of his son Fumi, and before the subsequent realization thatFumi is autustic.