Gajin Fujita

Gajin Fujita’s extensive body of painterly work is characterized 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 adroitly plays with the codes of his culture of origin—Japan—and American popular culture, interweaving pictorial elements of Japanese culture that he knows only in a mediated way as an American citizen. It is this experience of dual foreignness that informs the artist’s concise and powerful work. 

In Fujita’s complex paintings, symbols of the American West Coast’s ethnic and cultural diversity intersect with the logos of multinational companies and motifs from ukiyo-e woodcut prints of the Edo period. Gajin Fujita also emphasizes the tension between tradition and the present in the gold leaf he applies to the ground of his pictures, which, throughout cultural history, from the Orient to the Occident, has been reserved for the most precious of artworks. However, while in European medieval panel painting, the gold ground iconographically separated the sacred from the profane space, in Fujita’s work, it serves as the surface for graffiti tags and bold lacquered colours. 
 

Sophisticated calligraphic 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 spaces reveal the simultaneity of the extremely contradictory cultural signs of our globalized reality. The Californian painter’s consistently popular work is thus in tune with the times without losing sight of history. The Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Knight praised Fujita’s painting as “the most important 21st-century iteration of graffiti’s influence on art”. 
 

The artist, who was born in Los Angeles in 1972 to Japanese parents, came into close contact with Los Angeles graffiti culture as a teenager, and he joined the tagging crews KGB (Kidz Gone Bad) and KIIS (Kill to Succeed). His experiences with graffiti street art led Fujita down his own path to fine art, earning his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and his MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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