-- Mr. Fujimoto, you are active in all aspects of art, design, and social issues, including art projects. I would like to ask you about your approach to each of these activities and what is at the bottom of these activities.

The premise of my work and activities is not only my personal opinion, but also what I should do as an artist working in the contemporary world. In the past, there were "questions" that were beyond our control, such as the social burdens and environmental problems that have emerged in our society, such as wars, racial discrimination, and abnormal weather caused by global warming, and I combine these with the trends of the times and comparisons with the past to determine the themes of my works. I am also interested in the meaning of the various aspects of society. In this context, I have developed a concept for my work based on the relationship between the "energy" of society in various senses, human sexuality, and social phenomena. I believe that my role as an artist is to highlight and visualize social "questions" as an aspect of contemporary art expression.

-- What kind of place was FABRICA (Italy) [*1] for you?
[*1] Communication Research Center established by Benetton in 1994.

FABRICA is a place where creators under 25 years old from all over the world gather to practice design communication from a global perspective. When I was there (1999-2000), FABRICA often used social gaps such as human rights, war, and ethnicity as its motif. FABRICA is an organization founded by photographer Oliviero Toscani [*2] together with Benetton, and it was very impactful at the time to use the aforementioned themes as fashion advertising visuals, I believe that the experience of working with researchers from all over the world and seeing how the editorial department compiles common sense and other information from different perspectives from around the world into a thematic compilation has had a great influence on my current activities.

-- What did you do there?

I was in the design department, where we created spaces for exhibitions, designed products, incorporated the various projects going on at FABRICA into reality, and designed stores. It was a place to create not only visual communication but also an experience. Personally, I was free to come in and propose ideas to the graphic department on my own, or work with the video team to create artwork together.

-- What was it like to collaborate with creatives from different backgrounds around the world?

At that time, most of the members of FABRICA were from Europe and the U.S., with a few from Asia, including one from Hong Kong, but I was the only Japanese. In such a place, young people under the age of 25 were not only working on some substantial project, but also living together, crying, laughing, fighting, and creating with high motivation in a small community, with a touch of racism mixed in. It was an intense experience for me, who only had a Japanese perspective, and it was a valuable experience for me to make friends with people I still keep in touch with today.

-- When I saw Mr. Fujimoto′s tableau work, I was overwhelmed by the energy that covered the entire screen. How do you paint?

Recently, I have been focusing on creating paintings, and I am conscious of gravity, light, and time. What I try to do is to fix physical phenomena in my works that cannot be controlled by human hands. For example, I use oil-based and water-based paints at the same time, and use the force of gravity to depict physical phenomena that do not mix, or I mix different solvents at the same time to create phenomena that seem to break down.

-- it breaks down, and then it generates again, and then something like ...... is settled on the screen.

That′s exactly what I mean. The ground of the earth is solid, but in a larger view, it is moving slowly like a liquid, and mountains are being formed under the influence of a great force.

-- It looks at first glance as if you are painting by dripping and poling, but I understand that you use special paints and partially bring the paint that was dropped earlier onto the paint that was dropped later.

In the "Replacement" series, the artist peels off the dry parts of the drawing on film and collages them together, aiming for a departure from the déjà vu of abstract drawings. The artist inverts the timeline by weaving the layers of paint together, making them appear as if they are connected and flowing together. On the other hand, this one (referring to the work painted on an Arita-yaki pot rather than a flat surface like a canvas), this one has no drips of paint. Normally, glaze is a liquid, so it develops in the direction of gravity, but since the parts of the drawing are applied afterwards, there are places where there is no dripping at all, various directions, and I am trying to depict something uncomfortable by resisting physical phenomena that ignore gravity.

-- What specific activities are you trying to do to connect society and art?

I am not only creating physical works of art, but also working as an art project, starting with a project called NEW RECYCLE® around 2010 to update a new concept of recycling mark as a work of art, and then revaluing unwanted items and turning them into works of art. In 2016, we launched the "2021" project. In 2016, we launched a project called "2021", which is a project related to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. This project is related to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. When we get a symbol like "TOKYO 2020," Japanese people authoritatively create a value and rush forward. Populism, on the other hand, drags them down by advocating inequality, etc. But I don′t see them going as far as what they are going to do after this Olympics is over. As art behaves, we launched a symbol as "2021" to think beyond that, and made it a work of performance and documentation to be installed in various places, with a series of collaborations and other activities. Finally, we held an event called "TOKYO 2021" on the theme of development and art. The book [*3] and film [*4] are a compilation of that."

[3] "TOKYO 2021 -Facing the Times through Art and Architecture-" edited by TOKYO 2021 Executive Committee, Seigensha, 2021.
[4] "TOKYO 2021 -Facing the Times through Art and Architecture-" distributed by Amazon Prime Video

-- Indeed, I feel that the Olympic series of events is somewhat similar to the garbage problem. People buy things because they think "this looks good" and then end up throwing them away. ......

In the end, society sees it as a problem and tries to solve it, but human desires prevail. We are being driven into a realistic corner through such repetition. Even with the development of recycling and energy conservation, from an energy perspective, the scale of energy consumption as a whole is expanding, and there has been no shrinkage in history. The "question" is how we should face this fact.

-- The question is not whether it is good or bad that a society is blindly striving toward a single goal. ......

Yes, it′s not about good or bad. I am trying to represent such facts as an art project, and I started researching marine debris in 2019.

-- What kind of project is Marine Litter?

Most garbage is disposed of within the social structure, but what overflows the cycle is discharged into the ocean and scattered by ocean currents, regardless of national borders. In order to understand what exactly marine debris is, I went to the beach to search for actual marine debris myself, and used it as a material to create an artwork, including the situation of the debris. I have seen marine debris drifting ashore all over the world on TV and the Internet, but I have never actually seen it because I have only heard rumors about the huge amount of plastic, the fact that it is not decomposed and has been incorporated into the ecosystem as microplastics, etc., and the fact that "this is a big problem. We started by meeting with people who had information about the actual marine debris, and this developed into a story about finding large amounts of marine debris drifting ashore in places where people do not go, and instead of taking it home, melting it down on the beach there to make artwork. In the course of researching about the drifted garbage, we asked the local government, "What do you do with the collected garbage?" They replied, "Basically, we incinerate it. Marine debris is contaminated by the tide, has contaminants, and in short, cannot be recycled unless it is made of a single material. The local government and volunteers work hard to collect marine debris and eventually burn it. Disposal of marine debris costs money and is a priority because it is a taxpayer investment for the municipality. Places that are not valued as tourist resources are put on the back burner and will not be processed forever. In some places, the local government does not have the capacity to dispose of marine debris, so it is transported by boat to another location for disposal (......), which costs money anyway. Even if the waste is disposed of, it will soon wash up again. This is an art project to visualize these facts as a work of art.

-- What is the meaning of the title "LAST HOPE"?

There have been various attempts to recycle "swellings" that have overflowed from the social structure as products (industrial products), but it is very difficult to make a profit as a mass production. However, we thought there was potential for artwork. Because no two pieces of art made from marine debris are alike. The uniqueness of a work of art is what makes it valuable. Conversely, the conversion of that value is the only last hope. However, it was not well received and took about three years to sell.

-- It′s a bit of a shock, or perhaps resistance, to hear that it was garbage to begin with (laughs).

Around 100 years ago, around the time of Dadaism, a movement began to emerge in Europe to form paintings using materials other than paint, and around the 1960s in the United States, during the expansion of abstract expressionism by Rauschenberg and John Chamberlain, junk art emerged, using the materials as they were and turning them into artworks. The meaning of the material itself is incorporated into the concept of the work. The meaning of the material itself is incorporated into the concept of the work. This is an extension of Dadaism and Neo-Dada, which deviated from the conventional art styles. I think that John Chamberlain is the artist who corresponds to my Umigomi works. At the time, his works were a series of sculptures made by crushing and combining discarded metal objects such as car parts, etc., and composing them using the colors of the products without coloring them. As for my marine debris works, I combined brightly colored plastics and melted them together to create abstractions, so that the colors of the materials themselves became the picture plane. I believe that this is a context from contemporary reality as abstract expressionism, where the times have changed and the material has shifted to plastic.

-- There is a sense of the influence of the times in the change of materials.

What is interesting is that the materials used for marine litter are global. It is gathered from various Asian countries on the Japanese coastline, but it is also washed ashore on the Kuroshio Current to the west coast of the United States. The totally uncontrollable material itself moves, and on the beach where it happens to drift ashore, it is picked up and produced on that beach. There is an aspect of local problems, and I think the interrelationship is interesting.

-- Local production. Not local consumption, though.

The idea and feeling that ′we should not dump things in the ocean′ is actually a recent decades′ thing, as environmental issues are now being questioned. Until recent years, the ocean was a place to dump garbage. Until recently, the ocean was a place to dump garbage. Even after the Industrial Revolution, when humans began to stir, we still threw it away. About 100 million or 150 million tons of it has flowed out so far, and it exists somewhere without natural decomposition. It is impossible to recover it, and we cannot stop it from increasing. We live under such a planet, but we somehow believe that the ocean is clean. The nets contain small amounts of microplastics along with microorganisms. To my surprise, I was told that no survey anywhere in the world has ever found no microplastics in the nets. So I imagined that all ocean surfaces must have microplastics floating around. We can′t see it, but it is already there. There is a video work series called Fountain#Neustonplastics based on this theme. The surface of the sea is filmed with a video camera and mirrored vertically and horizontally, so that the surface of the sea unfolds like a kaleidoscope from the center to the outside. The work is about microplastics that you can′t see but are gushing out of the ocean.

-- Arita porcelain works are also interesting.

Arita-yaki porcelain is, of course, a traditional craft, and in 2013, when I began researching a collaboration with an Arita-yaki potter to commercialize a product, I learned that they had decades of inventory in their warehouse, including B (grade) porcelain, and had no plans to sell it. Once fired, ceramics do not return to the soil, just as Jomon earthenware still remains today. Not only Arita-yaki, but also ceramic potteries must continue to produce new products even if inventory remains due to the industrial structure, and inventory continues to accumulate for generations. Originally, Arita-yaki was a highly rare item that was hand-painted with detailed designs and presented to feudal lords or exhibited at World Expositions, but since the Meiji period, there has been a game change to sell Arita-yaki to the general public as a high-end craft. With the development of reproduction technology, the values of how to accurately maintain quality and sell in large quantities. In mass production, 10% of the pieces will always fail to pass the voluntary standards and will remain unsold." ARITA AURA" is a series of works made by cutting out and collaging large quantities of leftover transfer sheets for firing onto dead stock porcelain that has been fired. The combination of parts made for mass production was proposed as a unique work of art. The series continues to develop by combining various techniques of Arita-yaki porcelain. It can be said to be a NEW RECYCLE®︎ in the Arita-yaki style.

One of the obstacles we faced was that even if we proposed Arita-yaki as a unique work of art, we could not get out of the gravitational zone of Arita-yaki′s value. Arita-yaki, which is a traditional craft (mass production), is usually priced according to size and specifications, and even if you appeal that "this is a work of art, a one-of-a-kind item," the price is fixed at "about how much this Arita-yaki pot would cost. It was not that I could not sell at all, but I did see the difficulty of the framework of Arita-yaki reproductions, and the gap between craftwork and artwork. That is why I started the "Replacement#ARITA" series in recent years. As in the case of "Replacement," I wove and pasted non-glazed drawing parts, but did not bake them (although they are water-resistant). The firing and baking process consumes an enormous amount of energy, so we decided to use the same process for this piece. We are trying to transform Arita-yaki, and by extension, non-fired pottery, into something new.

-- Going back to your first question, what is the bottom line of each of your activities in terms of creating works of art?

I think it is a kind of human nature to be concerned with energy, or more specifically, the fact that recycling activities with good intentions are actually inefficient in terms of energy. If that is the case, it is better not to recycle. Electric cars (although seemingly eco-friendly) burn fossil fuels to produce electricity, and solar panels use enormous amounts of energy to produce solar panels, which eventually end up as industrial waste. If it is a solar panel, the solar panel is made with a huge amount of energy, and eventually a large amount of waste will be produced. There is room to consider which is more efficient, while gazoline cars have been developed straight away and have been in technological development for more than 100 years. Maybe they are doing it because it is new and converting to electricity would be more industrially exciting. There is some talk of making it mandatory to install solar panels on the roofs of new buildings in the future, and if that is the case, I can imagine the crazy things that will happen when it (the panels) are trashed after 20 years...

-- I hadn′t thought that far ahead a bit. I was only thinking that it would be good for the environment without giving it up.

Society cannot function for the future with disdain for people living today. But the future will come, and the children will be in a delicate situation. That is my "question. That is what I am interested in as an art activity. On the other hand, I am more interested in paintings and tableaus as works of art. I am not trying to depict the contradictions and questions I just mentioned in everything I do. I want to incorporate those concepts, but it′s not activism, so there are some abstract aspects. I want to incorporate those concepts, but I′m not an activist, so there are some abstract aspects.

-- Well, it is impossible not to have contradictions, isn′t it?

My art activity itself is a question, or rather, it is my personal question. I simply like it. I like to paint pictures with abstract phenomena, and I want to continue to do so even if it diverges from the art activitiy I just mentioned. At FABRICA, which I mentioned at the beginning, I was able to absorb how to look at the world. But I think I came to fi