 Native-san by Shelley Leopold LA Weekly
LA People
9 May, 2007 You could say that Gajin Fujita found his calling at Kyoto’s “Golden
Temple,” Kinkaku-ji. But it wasn’t a religious calling. The
street kid in Fujita, a Boyle Heights native, wondered what it would look
like if someone threw up a mural on the beloved Japanese landmark. Instead
of defacing the temple, he began building his own panels, and the process
began.
Fujita’s art has everything to do with hip-hop, butoh dance and
the Dodgers. It is the embodiment of the L.A. experience if it were processed
by an Old World shunga painter who doubled as a member of the K2S graf
crew. His style is a dizzyingly beautiful visual collision of East and
West, old and new, legal and illegal. Serpents, goldfish, chrysanthemums,
geishas, warriors and sports logos — painstakingly applied by hand — all
come together on backgrounds of gold leaf and foil, tangled with layers
of graffiti, supplied by Fujita’s crew.
Fujita’s approach, also influenced by the Asian antiquities that
his mother restored and the landscapes his late father painted, is well
practiced and unmistakably his own. It’s his early experience with
the K2S crew that gives Fujita’s paintings, informed by the colors
of aerosol paint, the forcefulness and movement that set them apart from
both traditional ukiyo-e printmaking and common graffiti callouts.
Fujita is currently working on a painting and works on paper that his
gallery, L.A. Louver, will exhibit at the Basel art fair in June. He is
also commencing a new body of work for his first solo show in London at
Haunch of Venison Gallery in April 2008.
Still, after all his success, he keeps his studio in the living room of
his childhood home, where his family still lives. Despite its now accommodating
racks of German-manufactured spray paint, the studio hasn’t changed
much since his father used it as his artmaking space.
“I think I would like to be a Robin Hood from Boyle Heights that
made it in the art world,” he recently divulged to art critic George
Melrod. “I think that could be part of the story of who I am.”
Source: http://www.lalouver.com/html/gajin.html
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