One Work: Kaori Fukuyama
Shape of Memory, 2021, acrylic gel, fabric, photographs, clear cords, light, 144 x 60 x 60 in., installation at Art Produce gallery, San Diego.
[Image Description: A construction made of white, translucent panels is suspended in a dark gallery space in a circular and staggered pattern. A white light is hidden in the center, which makes the sculpture glow and cast shadows on the concrete floor.]
Over time, several dimensions of Kaori Fukuyama’s delicate installation, Shape of Memory, reveal themselves to a patient viewer. Approximately one hundred small, translucent white panels hang from the ceiling of Art Produce’s gallery. Arranged in a circle around a light fixture, some are made of gel medium and others of sheer voile fabric. Each one bears a transfer of a photograph of San Diego’s North Park neighborhood, telling the story of the person who offered the photograph for the project. Thus, Fukuyama gathers together many discrete memories to build a collective memory, a careful layering of image and story.
Shape of Memory (detail), 2021, acrylic gel, fabric, photographs, clear cords, light, 144 x 60 x 60 in.
[Image Description: A closeup of the installation. A cluster of several old photographs— in black and white, sepia, and dark pinkish purple— depict the North Park neighborhood in faint images.]
Fukuyama made this work as a culmination of her five-week long residency at Art Produce. When I visited the installation on the closing evening in June 2021, I was struck by the idea that even though I didn’t know the people in the photographs, I could feel the nostalgia present in the images. A blurry photograph from the 1960s of several boys in their Little League uniforms, flanked by two coaches, recalled my own nieces and their childhoods. Photos captured old restaurants, cable cars and bridges, signage, old homes, and the North Park water tower that still serves a landmark. When I came across a twenty-year-old photograph of Art Produce, I reflected on its transformation over the years from a grocery store into a thriving community art space.
Shape of Memory (detail), 2021, acrylic gel, fabric, photographs, clear cords, light, 144 x 60 x 60 in.
[Image description: A view of the installation, looking down from above. Photographs hang from cords and are clustered in a circle around a hanging lightbulb.]
Fukuyama began her residency by requesting and collecting photographs from past and present residents of North Park, the North Park Historical Society, and the San Diego History Center. As she received emails and messages with the images, she began to conceptualize, in visual form, a story of a place and its people. To create the panels, Fukuyama printed photographs on paper, layering the material with gel medium, and then slowly rubbing the paper to complete the transfer. In doing so, the printed photo’s crispness is distressed; it pops with clarity in some places on the gel medium sheet, while in others, there is but a faint outline. In a dark gallery illuminated by a single light, the shadows cast a wide circle on the floor; the dark shapes are sharper in the center and blur as the circle expands.
Shape of Memory (detail), 2021, acrylic gel, fabric, photographs, clear cords, light, 144 x 60 x 60 in.
[Image description: A circular pattern of shadows on the concrete floor of the gallery.]
Photographs reveal the past. They hold moments in time, they trigger memories. In a conversation with Fukuyama, she shared with me the poetic questions about the nature of memory that arose for her through the project. Do good memories have a shimmer? Do they shine in our consciousness as we relate them to others? Do they make us feel light-hearted? And does the mind’s eye select and retain with a specificity that we do not control? In recent years, scientists have shown how every time we describe a memory, we alter it. In finding language for something we remember, we change it by omitting details and adding embellishments. Fukuyama has created a connection across time, between event and memory. She presents a parallel between memory’s transformation through the act of sharing and an image's transformation through the process of transfer to another material. Perhaps she also offers the idea that fragments of the past—arranged with care into a story—are all we have as we hurtle forward into an unpredictable future.
As a younger single woman, Fukuyama lived in North Park for a few years, working as a landscape designer by day and spending long hours painting in her small apartment. Her memory of that time is one of being free, of being eager and obsessed with the discovery of mark-making. She was learning about light and shadow, training herself in color and perception, all of which would come to form her artistic practice’s foundation. Much like that previous time, her residency at Art Produce—where she had access to space, organizational support, and a community of artists—enabled her to immerse herself in a singular project, in which long hours and experimentation yielded an experience that she shared with the community from conception to completion. It seems apt that in making Shape of Memory, steeped in her aesthetics, Fukuyama has entwined herself in the collective memory of North Park.
-Bhavna Mehta, artist. Mehta was a participant in the 2021 HereIn Writers Workshop.