What do these flying fish, caught in the air on 18” metal stakes, have to look forward to? A hundred mullets (saltwater fish) view images of the ocean’s horizon. A hundred trout (fresh water fish) look toward horizons of flowing rivers. They see from a distance what they cannot feel. We see but cannot feel their predicament. Like them, we long for a return to nature. Yet we catch wind of the fact that something in their (and our) eternalized, and visualized desire is, in the end, really fishy. This silent, empathetic dream, so carefully constructed, is dramatically ruptured by the live broadcast of CNN Headline News from one of the monitors in each of the rows. The intrusion of the “new,” the ephemeral and simultaneous “now,” in the midst of the natural and eternal order of fish, denies the possibility of our nostalgic immersion into nature’s past and frustrates our desire for romantic escape into the peace that rests below the surface of the water. The fish, like us, have to cope with the news of the day. As spectators, we walk through this installation, metaphorically “getting our feet wet.” We invade waters that clearly belong to others. We enter as individuals into a school of fish, in which we begin to feel the strangeness of our individuality, and the root of our isolation. All fish are alike—their rounded and patterned scales mark their universal kinship. A fish acts out its species. In contrast, a human being, especially one raised in the western world, strives to act out the self. But let’s look again at these fishat their heads, their fins, their tails. As soon as we try to “feel the way {they] do,” we make them into human beings. We see their differences, their individual personalities. They are both one and many, a fact about fish noted by many artists before. Can we be that way as well? We could be talking about the difference between Japanese and American culture, about the stereotypes of east and west. Modernity in the west was and is driven by glorification of the individual, nowhere more so than in America. Japanese modernity, characterized by its technological and economic success, has retained its long Confucian tradition of masking individual desires and needs in deference to larger social projects. Uniformity of exterior demeanor is respected there far more than individual expression. Fukawa, like many immigrants from Asian cultures, exists in an ongoing and difficult state of transition between these extremes. After all, Japan and the United States are geographically separated by an immense world of fish. I want to feel the way you do, all the time… is, however, not solely about immigration, nor about Fukawa. It speaks in a modern voice, calling forth a line-up of dualisms: individual vs. social group, nature vs. culture, continuity vs. change. East and west face off here. Our orientalizing predilections associate nature and continuity with the east, culture and change with the west. Modern Japan has long since been catapulted into the same dilemma. As a technologically and economically advanced culture, it idealizes nature, which it has so recently managed to disrupt or destroy in its own lands. Shinto and Buddhist traditions, both rooted in a reverence for nature, have remained strong cultural forces throughout their difficult modern and postmodern transitions. Western culture, during its own modernization, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, projected its dream of eternal nature onto the east, the “orient.” At times that “east” was Japan. Think of Van Gogh’s adoration of Japanese woodcuts for the truths they revealed of the beauty and nature of the landscape. Fukawa, in contrast, was raised in Tokyo, one of the largest and most densely populated cities in the world. Ironically he discovered nature in North Americaat The Banff Center School of Fine Arts in Alberta, Canada. He reverses the “orientalizing” tradition. As he is now living on a farm in Connecticut, nature for him has become the west. Traditional Japanese culture has strong respect for hierarchy, requiring silence from those ranking below. This is, in part, the silence we see as we look down upon Fukawa’s speechless, dried, and salted fish. Feudalism, destroyed in Japan only with World War II, could not tolerate individual voices. Old traditions die hard. In this installation, on the other hand, we, the western spectators, must submit (if we are to endure this work of art) to no end of words, constant “news,” from American broadcast television. Which situation gives greater freedom? Which a more oppressive subjection? We are silenced in the face of the fish and in the face of the media, in an orientalized east and the modern west. We are left with disconcerting thoughts in this problematic state of being both in and out of water. We, like Fukawa, are still in search of the elusive voice that gives us the status of individuals, and the elusive quiet of nature’s ways. Sherry Buckberrough |