GAJIN FUJITA

Gajin Fujita (born 1972 in Los Angeles, USA) masterfully plays with the codes of American popular culture and interweaves them with pictorial elements of the diverse ethnic cultures in a globalised world. Logos of multinational companies are fused with motifs reminiscent of the woodcuts and ukiyo-e paintings of the Edo period, the tribal signs of graffiti form the background for Raphael’s putti, a truly contemporary cosmos of hyper-entanglement opens up.

Gajin Fujita’s extensive painterly work is characterised by its bold mixture of classical Japanese motifs and painting techniques, the dynamic aesthetics of graffiti and diverse references to Western and East Asian painting history. The artist masterfully plays with the codes of American popular culture and interweaves them with pictorial elements of Japanese culture, to which Fujita belongs through his origins, but which he only knows in a mediated way as a native American. The artist draws his concise and powerful work from this experience of a double foreignness.

The symbols of the diverse ethnic cultures of the American West Coast are fused in Fujita’s complex work with logos of multinational companies and motifs from the woodcut and ukiyo-e painting of the Edo period. Gajin Fujita also emphasises the tension between tradition and the present by using gold leaf for the background, as was used for precious paintings from the Orient to the Occident. In European medieval panel painting, the gold ground iconographically separated the sacred space from the profane space. In Fujita’s work, it serves as a background for graffiti tags and bright lacquer colours.

Sophisticated caligraphic language games are also at home in the artist’s multiverse. Fujita’s works are the expression and result of a contemporary, multi-layered production of culture and images. In their ‘all-over’, his pictorial space shows the simultaneity of extremely contradictory cultural signs of our globalised reality. The consistently popular work of the Californian painter is thus in tune with the times without losing sight of history. Christopher Knight from the Los Angeles Times praised Fujita’s painting as “the most important interpretation of the influence of graffiti on art in the 21st century”.

Born in Los Angeles, the artist of Japanese descent came into close contact with Californian graffiti culture as a teenager and joined the tagging crews KGB (Kidz Gone Bad) and KIIS (Kill to Succeed). Through his experiences with the street art of graffiti, Fujita found his own path to fine art, earning his BA from Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles and his MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Gajin Fujita’s works are represented in important institutional collections, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, USA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, USA, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, USA, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, USA, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, USA, Hunter Museum, Chattanooga, USA, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, USA.