Mayuko FujiNo
INTERVIEW BY ELIZABETH PERRY
ELIZABETH PERRY: I understand you grew up in Japan, and that you consider your background to have had a significant impact on you and your art. Can you talk about that impact, and how specifically you feel your background has influenced your work? MAYUJO FUJINO: Its biggest influence on me is the mixture of rational and irrational ideas in the society, and how natural it is for people there to accept it. It seems to me to be often the case that for Japanese people contradictions are not necessarily conflicts and merge without a problem. For example, I used to work at a data center which stored servers for Internet companies in Tokyo. All the systems and the layout of the building were designed based on reason, anticipating all the possible accidents and taking measures to protect against them. At the same time we had a Kamidana, a miniature Shinto altar to worship both the animistic spirits of nature and the ancestors in our office, and it was our job to make an offering to it every morning in order to protect the data center. It was interesting to see those two ideas based on completely different approaches existing together with nobody feeling strange about it. It indicated that there was a primitive fear and respect towards nature remaining among people who humbly feel there is always something you can’t control no matter how clever and highly developed you are. Rationality can’t defeat a sense of awe, and this is where irrationality gets its power like in dreams, where things lose clear meanings and the notion of cause and effect. It is a different layer of reality where an alternate logic rules like it does in Lewis Carroll’s wonderland. I feel like my art comes from that kind of place. EP: A self-taught artist, you developed your style largely through experimentation. How did you become interested in art? Did you come from an artistic family? How do you feel your lack of “formal instruction” has influenced your art or career? MF: There weren’t any artists in my family, but my mother had an appreciation of art and enjoyed making little things. I still remember that she made some tiny clay figures of houses, woods and a lake with swans in it, and painted them with watercolors when I was 4 years old.
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It felt like magic to me to see her materialize those images. The biggest inspiration which made me interested in art as a child were the visuals in the Beatles’ film “Yellow Submarine” created by Heinz Edelmann; I was completely fascinated by them. I guess I’m one of those people who were born stubborn and don’t read manuals. I enjoy learning from trial and error, getting lost and figuring out a way, for that’s what making art is about anyway. I felt comfortable not having formal instruction, since it would allow me enough time to spend on experimentation until I could get fully satisfied without anybody telling me what’s right or wrong. EP: You mention in your artist statement that the dual nature of Japanese paper cutart is something you’ve found appealing, and which plays a role in your work’s ability to blur similar distinctions between reality and fantasy, order and chaos, and consciousness and unconsciousness. How do you feel your work incorporates this duality, aesthetically or thematically? MF: Paper cutout is a technique with many restrictions which makes it not a spontaneous process for me. You need to be very conscious of your decisions as to which part of the paper you keep and let go, since once you cut it off you can’t put it back. The composition is planned beforehand; things are in control on this level. You know what’s going on here (or at least you think you do.) However, when it is put together with a collage underneath, all those clearcut lines get fuzzy and what is illustrated sometimes becomes obscure. If it gets too fuzzy, it would just end up as a mess, so it’s important to find the point of balance between construction and destruction, and the former is the main role of the paper cutout in my work. It’s like grammar in language. You can play around with it, and it is fun, but if there’s too much messing around, nobody understands what you are talking about. EP: Your art relies on intricate paper cutout designs superimposed on collage made from magazine pages. By combining collage with paper cutout art, you completely transform original magazine images from concrete depictions of objects, people, and places into pure representations of colors and textures. How does this idea of aes-