Daisuke Fukunaga

Backlighting brings things into relief

In Gallery 2, we find your mop paintings.

After my initial impression of mops led me to paint "married mops", I spent all of last year focused on mops and projecting things I liked onto them. Untitled here is the last mop painting I did, and I wanted to revisit the anthropomorphic image of married mops. They still look like faces but also retain mop-like qualities, and I tried painting them without overexpressing the imagery.

They have a tranquil feel.

Yes, they became a bit calmer.

After you had run amok in "Workers 4", right? [laughs]

Had a stomach ache then, I think [laughs]. When I really bear down on a painting, I always come up with something like "Workers 4". Otherwise, the thing just won’t hold together. I want to get right to the edge, but keep myself from going over. I don’t know if it’s working or not though.

The canvas of "married mops" is shaped like a parallelogram. Was this intentional?

Actually, I didn’t notice it when I first started painting. At one point, I looked it at from a distance and thought, “it’s skewed, but it’s probably okay.” I just left it.

I didn’t notice it at first either, but then I thought, “huh?”

But it’s not a deliberate parallelogram. The angles are subtle. I wasn’t trying to make a parallelogram. It’s only a slight distortion, so I decided to show it.

The work "The Light" is part of your air-conditioner outdoor unit series, isn’t it?

I don’t really have a special thing for air-conditioner outdoor units. Instead, I’m simply attracted to the places where you tend to find these units.

Are you drawn to backlighting, which you mentioned earlier, because it also has this behind-the-scenes quality, or is it simply an element you have always liked using?

I like it for its own character. I’m always looking at things in the dark. Backlighting brings things into relief. Perhaps, backlighting goes hand in hand with the background worlds I’m interested in.

Do you paint at night?

I paint at night.

The image of headlights illuminating the scene behind the billboards is very powerful.

Oh, really?

It seems familiar to us somehow, like deja vu.

I think this comes not only from our experience of actually seeing this kind of light, but also from the influence of movies and photographs.

What’s this building?

It’s a hotel. A boutique hotel [love hotel]. It’s pretty shabby. Love hotels like this usually look fancy in front but dingy in back. The same is true with a lot of apartment buildings. And love hotels are often in weird, desolate locations, like by the side of the highway. In places I like.

Is this blue form also a hotel?

No, it’s a driving range.

When you were preparing for this exhibition, did you consider how it might contrast to your earlier show here?

The main question for me was how to reconcile a year’s worth of work on a single theme?the mop?with the more situation-based images in the earlier works and the billboard series here. I think both bodies of work reflect my interest in the crowding of things hidden from view, and in the power of illuminated objects. They also connect to my sense of the madness and anxiety inherent in the provincial world around me. This led me to the title Local Emotion. In contrast to the first show, which was made up of works that I already had at studio, I wanted this exhibition to carry a more specific message. For this reason, I see <Local Emotion> as my pro debut.