Daisuke Fukunaga

Local Emotion

Please tell us how you got started painting pictures.

I’ve always liked drawing. I’ve been drawing since I was child. I used to copy the art on the bindings of comic books and wanted to become a cartoonist. This was in elementary school and junior high. But I couldn’t come up with stories, or draw girls. I just liked drawing isolated human figures and not worry about what is in background. I discovered, with painting, you could spend a long time with an image; you could really investigate things, so I gravitated towards painting, towards art.

Weren’t you on the baseball team?

No, basketball. In junior high school. I was captain even, but a lousy one. We didn’t win once. [laughs]

Did you join the art club in high school?

Well, I joined it, but wasn’t really comfortable, so I stopped going. When I entered high school, I had this weird notion that I would find different kinds of people there, but I wound up not fitting in or making many friends. My thinking changed during sophomore year, when I started going to an art yobiko (preparatory school) and discovered a real variety of students, even an old friend from elementary school. I’m still close to a lot of the people I met there.

What kind of pictures were you making then?

Similar things to what I’m doing now. Taking lots different elements and composing them within the frame. But I lacked technique then, and the pictures never really came together.

Even with a definite composition in mind?

Right. Besides, I was also trying to focus on my entrance exams.

I’d like to talk about the works now. The newer paintings seem quite different from the older works. At your first solo exhibition here in September 2006, you displayed various configurations of multiple elements, as in the painting for the announcement, "neighborhood garden" (2006). In contrast to this strong sense of strange objects clustered together, the works this time have a more natural, stand- alone quality.

I’m conscious of this change. For the first show, I brought all these objects I liked into a specific format, the garden for example, and the paintings arose out of the objects bouncing off each other. This time, I became more interested in concentrating on depicting the individual objects. After happening to discover that mops looked a lot like people, I decided to focus on this idea last year.
One reason for the mop paintings is that, as I said, I wanted to devote a lot of time to portraying one subject. Another reason is that mops have this behind-the-scenes existence, and I tend to be drawn to things that don’t spend much time in the sun. They typify my idea of “local,” which is this exhibition’s theme. I had clearly narrowed down what I wanted to paint this time: mops in the closet, the backsides of signs, etc. The setting for Tough Guys is a building-materials yard. I was less interested in depicting abrupt dislocations than really trying to focus on one place and capture its atmosphere.

Do the all of the places that you painted actually exist?

A lot of the things and spaces in the paintings do exist. I tend to find the things I’m interested in all over the place. Memories of different times overlap and blur. I take the things that arise and make an overall image.

Do you use the photos you take of places as material for the paintings?

I don’t look at the photos long. I do at the very beginning to get a bare sense of the place, but I mostly rely on drawings. I use different methods of drawing. Often just a scrawl.

First we have the work "Have a break!", and over here is "local emotion", which I heard took you a long time.

It took a little over a month.

What aspect of it took the longest? It still retains some of the strangeness of the earlier works.

It’s based on my vision of what lies behind a billboard, which is a scene we normally overlook. I think it comes across as weird because we’re simply not used to seeing it. Behind this billboard I actually found the incinerator, the oil drum, and the plywood, so that’s why I painted them.

The top of the incinerator is strangely shaped, like a face.

That’s right. I didn’t really know how I was going to paint it. I wrecked it two or three times and now it looks like this.

What do you mean by“wrecked?”

I did it once and thought, “no, that’s not right,” and then slapped white paint over the face part and did it again.

But the torso was ok, so you left it?

That’s right.

Are those fruits hanging there persimmons?

Yes, they’re persimmons. They’re also around my parent’s home.

The work "a sunny place" reminds me the earlier "hatake no senshitachi (fighters of the field)", with the cds in the field.

That may be because the paint looks a bit raw. I was very excited to paint the persimmons and the palm tree in local emotion. They both have a real “local” feel. You always find them. The palm tree and the persimmon tree.

Palm tree? You mean cycad?

Cycad?

Yes, the tree painted right here, with the hairy trunk.

Right, right. They’re called cycads? I thought they were some kind of tropical tree, but I guess they’re everywhere. But it doesn’t look very Japanese, does it? It’s a bit tropical and at the same time local. If you go into the countryside you find lots of them.

With the cycad there, it gives the garden a slightly creepy look.

Yes, it does, when it hangs down too low. But I always get a warm and fuzzy feeling from a garden with a little bungalow and a cycad tree. It’s nice.

I’m sure we all now have images of local landscapes floating through our minds.

When I say I’m painting the local, however, I mean what’s right around me, and not some pastoral scene with fields spreading wide.

In the building-material yard painting "Tough Guys", what’s curling around in the foreground?

That’s barbed wire. You may have never seen a place like it.

I have, but the curls have so much life in them, I thought they might be some kind of plant. What is this down at the bottom?

That’s a traffic cone, and next to it is a broken umbrella, blown there by a typhoon maybe.

The cone seems to have melted in a pool of kerosene. Is that why you painted a rainbow there?

I was trying to get across that shiny look asphalt has after a rain.

Your palette has grown quite vivid. Are you focusing on specific colors these days?

My studio is in an industrial area, and the buildings have these colorful walls and corrugated sidings. But the colors are baked by the sun. They’re beautiful.

Those industrial colors are vivid, but not exactly pretty, aren’t they?

Right. But lit up by the streetlights at night, these industrial buildings look amazing.

Tell me about the painting "background".

This is also a scene behind some billboards. I’m interested in zones like this, usually built on unstable terrain, where stuff either gets dumped or blown in by the wind.

Are the billboards floating off the ground?

No, they’re attached to posts.

You have a tree growing here.

Bright lights on the other side, from the pachinko parlor and car headlights, hit the billboards and leak between them to illuminate this background world.

In your mop series we also find works where the light source comes from behind.

Yes, they’re backlit. I am somehow attracted to backlighting.