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Here you can find artist texts and statements, reviews contributed by writers and critics, and selected archival materials.
Photo Works, 2026.
Artist Text:
From the Knot, a World Emerges
I have been creating works that move between images and words, dream and reality, light and shadow.
I have long been interested in forms of expression where stories and images are closely intertwined, such as myths, fairy tales, children’s literature, picture books, and manga, and have drawn on them as sources for my work. Through images and words, objects and space, I feel that I have been searching for the moment when a world is born.
Motifs such as children, animals, masks, rooms, forests, lakes, gardens, and stars appear repeatedly in my works. They exist as entrances through which emotions and traces of memory, before they become words, can be woven into stories.
In making picture books, I have engaged with the moment when images and words come together and a new world is born. In working with old objects, I have read the traces left within weathered and broken things, and reconnected them with new meanings and stories.
For me, painting, making picture books, and working with old objects are all connected as attempts to discover the traces dwelling in images and objects, and to reconnect them as stories. And from that point of connection, a world begins to emerge.
2026. 6.
From the artist’s notes
Photo Works, 2017-2020.
Artist Text:
The Unbound Image
Folktales, legends, and myths may have been born from the awe, mystery, and sense of sacredness that people felt toward certain objects and places.
The camera is a device that records such objects and places, and separates images from them. By erasing the details of what has been photographed, the image is further released from a specific place and time. As concrete traces fade, the photograph becomes not merely a record, but an image opened beyond time.
When standing before such a photograph, we are drawn away from the present and led toward a more distant time through the image before us. What appears there is the presence of objects and places where people once felt awe and mystery. From within that presence, stories are born, and new images begin to emerge.
2020.
From the artist’s notes
Photo Works, 2017-2020.
Artist Text:
Things That Hold Stories
Objects have their own origins. They have a past in which they once rested in someone’s hands, in a certain time and place. The time and memories dwelling within them may be like poems, like short stories, and at times like novels.
Yet the stories that these objects originally held are often lost over time, and new stories may be given to the emptiness they leave behind.
In the context of old objects, this can be understood as mitate. It is an act of reading the meaning of an object anew and placing it in another context, in other words, a form of recontextualization. Just as one may see a stone or a piece of wood as a mountain, or find scenery within a broken vessel, shifting an object away from its original use or meaning allows another image or presence to emerge within it.
In the context of art, this resonates with found objects, readymades, objects, and assemblage. I became drawn to such ways of being within objects, and began collecting old things.
2017.
Excerpted and reconstructed from the olim website
Beginning of a World, When Stories are Born –Gallery b. Tokyo, Tokyo 2016.
Artist Text:
Beginning of a World, When Stories are Born
Since ancient times, people have created folktales, legends, and myths, deepening their understanding of the world around them through these stories.
Confronted with the unknown, they felt both awe and wonder. They recognized the sacred, revered it, and, through the creation of stories, gradually formed images of that which lay beyond their understanding.
Stories are a means of deepening our understanding of what remains unknown. They are also a process through which individuals, communities, and societies establish the foundations upon which they define themselves.
Through stories, we are able to intuitively sense why we exist here and now.
In this sense, it may be said that the world begins with stories.
August 2016.
Excerpted from the exhibition text for the solo exhibition “Beginning of a World, When Stories are Born”
Prayer for Wreckage of Reveries –Satellite Gallery of Aichi University of the Arts, Aichi 2013.
Review:
Solo Exhibition “Prayer for the Wreckage of Reveries”
Upon entering the gallery, viewers are drawn into a mysterious pictorial space that creates the illusion of wandering through a deep forest of dark, leafy imagery. It is often said that contemporary painting by younger artists has become increasingly superficial and fragile, yet there are still moments when one encounters the excitement of discovering a new talent.
After studying sculpture at Seian University of Art and Design, Fukuyama continued his artistic development in painting at the graduate school of Aichi University of the Arts. Although his paintings are a relatively recent development in his practice, they reveal a persistent concern with constructing space through an awareness of three-dimensional form.
When confronting the question of how to negotiate the boundary between painting and sculpture, the artist is drawn to the fragile motif of reverie. Dominating the picture plane are dark, floating forms that resemble scattered leaves.
These forms can appear either as faces or as purely compositional arrangements, unsettling perception through a trompe-l'œil-like ambiguity. The presence of what might be called a “Black Sun” lies at the foundation of his creative practice. Within the life that hovers at the very edge of darkness, there also lingers the scent of death.
Black functions as a kind of shadow image, interacting with the lantern-like glow that drifts behind it, creating a heightened sense of depth and layered meaning.
June 12, 2013.
Masato Kurotani
Arts and Culture Department, Editorial Bureau, Chunichi Shimbun
Excerpted from a review published in Chunichi Shimbun.
Works, Kyoto 2011-2013.
Artist Text:
On Prayer for the Wreckage of Reveries
Reveries sometimes come to cover an era, a society, or even one's own life.
But they are never permanent. At some point, in some fleeting instant, they collapse.
What remains is wreckage, slowly fading into history.
I gather those forgotten fragments and offer them a prayer.
Perhaps creation itself is an act of this kind.
May 2013.
Excerpted from the exhibition text for the solo exhibition “Prayer for the Wreckage of Reveries”
Scenery in Dim Light –Tokyo Wander Site Hongo, Tokyo 2012.
Review:
Solo Exhibition “Scenery in Dim Light”
I understand that Fukuyama's current method emerged from his desire to capture the atmosphere of daybreak: first constructing a multicolored ground and then placing black forms upon it.
It seems to me that the discovery of this approach has generated effects and lines of thought far more complex than those originally anticipated.
According to the artist, the ground is created without predetermined colors or compositional arrangements. Likewise, the black forms are not conceived as specific shapes in advance, but are gradually placed throughout the canvas as the work develops. Yet within this process, certain formal principles begin to emerge of their own accord. Particular shapes recur repeatedly, symmetrical compositions naturally take form, and the black elements embody an upward movement from bottom to top, much like the growth of plants. Several such laws of form appear, though it is impossible to say from where they arrive.
What I found here was a curious sense of receptivity: the artist seems to open himself to the arrival of these formal principles and patiently await their emergence. The choice of oil painting as a medium is equally significant. Unlike acrylic paint, which dries quickly and allows little revision, oil paint requires time before its results fully reveal themselves. In doing so, it grants the black forms the slow duration necessary for their gradual becoming.
August 2012.
Mika Kuraya
Chief Curator, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
From the exhibition catalogue of *TWS-Emerging 2012
Works, Kyoto 2011-2012.
Artist Text:
On Scenery in Dim Light
Scenery in Dim Light refers to a landscape where light and shadow intermingle, a landscape that exists on the boundary where one thing merges with another.
In myths and folktales, nature, humans, animals, and plants often cross their boundaries, transforming into one another or becoming fused together. Like dreams themselves, they exist as ambiguous images on the threshold between categories, embracing contradiction within their very being.
Such images, reminiscent of myths and folktales, also emerge within Scenery in Dim Light. These landscapes gradually connect with one another, forming a narrative.
Within the dim light, where the way ahead cannot clearly be seen, what kinds of landscapes might we perceive? And what kinds of stories might we discover within them?
These are the questions that this exhibition seeks to explore.
August 2012.
From the exhibition text for the solo exhibition “Scenery in Dim Light”
Works, Kyoto 2011-2012.
Artist Text:
Stranded in Infinity Rooms
There are many rooms within the human heart. These rooms have different kinds and layers. Some are entered often, while others are rarely stepped into. Perhaps the human heart is shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by the way these rooms exist.
A single work is like one room within the heart. The images that appear in a work reveal to me the existence of rooms I had not been aware of in daily life. Within them are things I have kept shut away, and things I have cast aside.
I believe that these are my own shadows. To know the shadows within those rooms is essential to understanding myself more deeply. Light and shadow are always two sides of the same thing.
That is why I create works as rooms, and enter into them. Not all of these rooms necessarily become meaningful to me. Even so, I continue to explore them, stepping further into their depths.
By sharpening my senses toward each encounter with an image, I feel that, through the work, I may be able to touch the images that exist in the depths of the human heart.
March 2011.
From the artist’s notes
Photo Works, 2017-2020.
Archive:
Light and Shadow
When we look at a painting, we naturally see “light” and “shadow.”
Bright areas and dark areas. Through the difference between them, we perceive form, depth, and presence.
However, the light and shadow discussed here are not merely matters of painterly technique.
How have people seen the world? What have they believed in, what have they feared, and within what kinds of values have they lived?
Perhaps the consciousness of each era is also reflected in the representation of light and shadow.
Written during my time in graduate school, this short essay considers the history of Western art and the nature of art in the contemporary age from this perspective.
In this essay, I examine the history of Western art through three perspectives: “Light and Shadow in Relation to God,” “Light and Shadow in Relation to Humanity,” and “Light and Shadow in Consumer Society.”
From antiquity through the Middle Ages, light was deeply connected to God and the mysteries of nature. Light was not something humans could freely control, but was understood as something given by a greater presence that supported the world.
In the modern period, this center shifted from God to humanity. As people came to think, choose, and determine their own ways of living, anxiety, loneliness, and psychological instability also emerged. These movements of the inner self began to appear in works of art as a new form of light and shadow.
In the contemporary age, the boundary between original and copy has become increasingly ambiguous. Images are consumed, broken down, and reconstructed as data. Light and shadow, too, no longer seem to arise from a single center, but from countless pieces of information and signs.
What this essay attempts to do is to trace the changes in light and shadow in order to understand the kinds of societies and values from which art in each era has emerged.
At the same time, it was also an attempt to consider how artists and artworks might discover their own meaning and come into being as art in an age when central values have become difficult to see.
To look at art as a mirror of its time.
And, through the light and shadow reflected in that mirror, to think about the age in which we ourselves live.
This essay was written as one perspective for doing so.
2010.
Excerpted and reconstructed from the essay “Light and Shadow”