Hiroshige Fukuhara "Codex Variabilis"

This exhibition, "Codex Variabilis," is a project that attempts a visual reinterpretation of William Blake's poem "Auguries of Innocence." The poem's ambiguous prophecies and the intertwining of opposing concepts, such as innocence and violence, beauty and destruction, continue to have strong meanings even today. In an age of information overload, these meanings can be seen as being even more expanded as "variable."

In this exhibition, rather than quoting the poems themselves, I have extracted symbolic fragments contained in each paragraph and reorganized them as structured visual motifs. Specifically, I have converted a line from a poem into the form of the alphabet, creating a unique typeface in which the letters themselves are replaced with sculptural images. This is not simply a design manipulation, but an act of visually and physically reconstructing "poetry" on the premise that the meaning of language can be transformed through structure and form.

The message depicted using this alphabet is composed of words that at first glance seem unrelated to "Omens of Innocence." However, the very shape of the letters contains poetic structure and symbolism, and viewers will experience both a sense of discrepancy and resonance between the superficial message and the poetic reverberations that resonate in the background. In this way, words are reconstructed from "tools" for conveying meaning into "entities" that contain meaning, becoming the subject of new interpretations.

Furthermore, in this exhibition, the entirety of "Premonitions of Innocence" was given to an AI as a literary corpus, and after having it learn the worldview of the poem, a fictional character was generated from it. Even though this character is not visually depicted, the symbols and images of the poem are structurally incorporated in the generation process. Then, by reconstructing the character through Voronoi tessellation, it is presented as a "collection of meanings" that is not specific, but dispersed, overlapping, and ambiguously intertwined. Here, the generativity of AI intersects with mathematical structure in an attempt to visualize the essence of poetry as a "distribution."

Throughout the exhibition, opposing concepts such as text and image, poetry and code, innocence and artifice intersect, and a structure emerges in which they fluctuate and invert with one another. The Codex Variabilis is by no means a book with a fixed meaning, but rather symbolizes the never-ending process of transformation in which poetry is broken down into the alphabet, letters become images, and images are translated back into language.

If "meaning" is not something that is written in advance, but something that emerges in the act of interpreting it, then this exhibition aims to create a "space" for that very act. How does the meaning of the poem "Premonition of Innocence" change, how is it reconstructed, and how does it emerge in our current age? We hope you will enjoy this attempt to reexamine the act of "reading" itself from the intersection of vision and language.

Hiroshige Fukuhara

1975 Born in Osaka
1997 BA, Design Course ,Osaka University of Arts
Lives and works in Tokyo

Solo Exhibitions

2016 "Modulation"  AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2013 “instantiation” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2012 “Recursion” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2010 “Binary” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo

Group Exhibitions

2012 “New Gallery × New Artists × New Works” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2011 “Gallery artists' show 2011” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2001 “BUZZ CLUB: News From Japan” PS1 MoMA Contemporary Art Center, NY
“media message: look thru language” Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai
1997 “Philip Morris Art Award #1: Final Selection” Spiral Hall, Tokyo

Art Fairs

2013 “The Armory Show 2013” Solo Show, New York, USA
2012 “The Armory Show 2012” New York, USA
2010 “PULSE MIAMI 2010” Miami, USA
2010 “PULSE New York 2010” New York, USA

Artist Statement

I feel that our so-called “existence” is so vaporous and subtle that it's “existence” is almost doubtful. But when fresh new-blown flower falls in short period of time, I can find many stories in that fleet of time.

This is because I feel that even if each of it is not special, by connecting, weaving and lapping, the world keep on changing infinitely. Variable, Function, Array data, Parameter, Method, to me all these similar programming. I would like to capture the world as programmable and repeatability structures.

This changing context is my feeling of “now”, my feeling of “existence”. I want to find out where is the borderline between existence and not.

Hiroshige Fukuhara