Gajin Fujita is an artist who blends Japanese techniques and symbols with Western urban, pop culture to create visually contrasting masterpieces that transcend space and time.
Born in , Gajin Fujita is the son of Japanese parents – a fine art painter father and art conservator mother – who raised him and his brothers in Boyle Heights, a historic immigrant neighborhood just east of Downtown Los Angeles and the L.A. River. As a teenager, Fujita became fascinated with graffiti, joining the tagging crews KGB (Kidz Gone Bad) and KIIS (Kill to Succeed). Through graffiti, Fujita followed his own path towards fine art and received his BA from Otis College of Art & Design, Los Angeles, and his MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he found mentorship under art critic Dave Hickey. Reverence for Japanese art history and pride for his identity as an L.A. native assert equal importance in Fujita’s work. Lauded by Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times as “the most important 21st century iteration of graffiti’s influence on art,” Fujita’s paintings incorporate graffiti language, traditional iconography drawn from Edo-period woodblock prints, and symbols of West Coast c
Gajin Fujita
Born in to Japanese parents, Gajin Fujita ('97) wasted no time in establishing himself in the world of art, first while honing his style as a graffiti artist on the streets of East Los Angeles, and later at L.A. Louver and museums such as LACMA, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City) and several international venues in Switzerland, Greece, and Belgium.
Luckman Gallery Director Julie Joyce said of Fujita's work, "His striking color and gold leaf panels depict the same distinguished, mythological figures that may be found in the venerated Japanese tradition of tattoo art as well as ukiyo-e prints - images distributed to the masses in the Edo period yet which resonate today with amazing magnificence."
Fujita blends Eastern techniques (anime, partitioned screens), and elements (geishas, warriors, demons), with Western, urban imagery (Latino graffiti, U.S. pop culture imagery) in a way that is stunning and vibrant, yet harmonious.
His startling works embody the cultural and class contradictions that are an integral part of urban Los Angeles. He constantly explores how artistic traditions are both maintained and altered as they move ac
Gajin Fujita’s extensive body of painterly work is characterized by its bold mixture of classical Japanese motifs and painting techniques, the dynamic aesthetics of graffiti and diverse references to Western and East Asian painting history. The artist adroitly plays with the codes of his culture of origin—Japan—and American popular culture, interweaving pictorial elements of Japanese culture that he knows only in a mediated way as an American citizen. It is this experience of dual foreignness that informs the artist’s concise and powerful work.
In Fujita’s complex paintings, symbols of the American West Coast’s ethnic and cultural diversity intersect with the logos of multinational companies and motifs from ukiyo-e woodcut prints of the Edo period. Gajin Fujita also emphasizes the tension between tradition and the present in the gold leaf he applies to the ground of his pictures, which, throughout cultural history, from the Orient to the Occident, has been reserved for the most precious of artworks. However, while in European medieval panel painting, the gold ground iconographically separated the sacred from the profane space, in Fujita’s work, it serves as the surface for gra
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