MIRAN FUKUDA
Japanese
Exemplary of the young generation of Japanese
artists emerging at the end of the century, Miran
Fukuda is known as a multi-media artist who often
deals with issues of authorship, authenticity, and
the coding of visual information, and the relation-
ships among photography, painting, and consumer
culture. While she does not create photographs in
any traditional manner, in her art Fukuda often
deals with her senses developed through photogra-
phy, the history of art, and the digital culture, and
she expands upon the experiments of the concep-
tual photographers of the 1970s and 1980s, includ-
ing figures such as Gilbert & George, Robert
Heinecken, and Richard Prince.
Fukuda was born into a family of artists; her
maternal grandfather was an illustrator of chil-
dren’s books, and her father, Shigeo Fukuda, is
perhaps Japan’s best-known graphic designer of
the post-World War II era. She grew up in a family
home where prints by American Pop Artists Roy
Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were hung, and it
was not surprising that Fukuda began considering
an artistic career at age 15.
Upon completing a master’s degree in oil paint-
ing at the prestigious Tokyo University of Fine Art
and Music in 1987, Fukuda started receiving atten-
tion from Japan’s art world and received numerous
awards, including the 32nd(1989) Yasui Prize (cre-
ated in honor of Sotaro Yasui, a Japanese moder-
nist painter) for her still life paintingWednesdayas
the youngest recipient in the history of the award,
which was given annually until 1996 to an artist of
excellence younger than age 50 pursuing represen-
tational painting. Soon, she started showing in-
ternationally, including the traveling exhibition
Photography and Beyondin Japan (1995), where
she showed six photo-based works, includingTable-
cloth(1990), acrylic paint and commercially photo-
printed plastic on panel;Still Life: Apple, Pears,
Cake Boxes and Pot(1992), color photograph; and
The Princess Margarita as Seen by Don ̃a Maria
Augustina(1992), acrylic on board) that demon-
strated her unique conceptual interplay between
photography and painting mediums.
To Fukuda, art is a means of expression through
which she challenges viewers on conventional re-
cognition and concepts of art, and through which
she proposes new ways of looking and thinking.
Further, Fukuda believes that her work, a realized
manifestation of her thoughts and values, is effec-
tive only if it is transmitted to a viewer as a clear
opinion, as if it were an excellent writing piece.
Desiring her paintings not to be the paintings of
the past, while acknowledging they are like paint-
ings from the past, and desiring her work to be
revolutionary, Fukuda has investigated and chal-
lenged the issue of ‘‘subjectivity’’ in the work of art,
which, she believes, has been a core element of
historical painting. Fukuda has attempted to con-
struct art through ‘‘coded’’ visual information,
using well-known existing images and icons such
as master European and Japanese paintings and
Disney characters to minimize subjectivity in her
work, presenting it as ready made and reproducible.
Her investigation of the photographic medium, par-
ticularly newspaper photography, is related to this
interest. Perhaps her best-known works dealing
with this issue areGilbert & George and I(2001)
andFrank Stella and I(2001), both painted with
acrylic on panel. Both paintings are based on
enlarged snapshots in which Fukuda posed with
well-known artists. She investigates whether snap-
shots, which usually exist as recorded evidence (i.e.,
I was there with the artists) rather than as art works,
thus perhaps lacking ‘‘subjectivity’’ as art, can be
turned into works of art. With respect to ‘‘authen-
ticity,’’ since 1996, Fukuda has been making a series
of works, composed simply of a newspaper page
which shows reproduction of her work (e.g., an
exhibition review), titling it with a name of the
newspaper and the date of publication, and giving
it an edition number based upon a number of the
newspaper printed. In this series, Fukuda focuses
on the commercial practice of and market for repro-
ductions of paintings, whether by her or a historical
master painter, which reduces them to mere com-
modities, suggesting that there may be no concep-
tual (and perhaps no production value) difference
between such fine arts reproductions and a news-
paper reproduction. This critical approach is evi-FUKUDA, MIRAN