by Cornelia Feye

December 4, 2024

It is not easy to find Techne Gallery. Located in an industrial Park off Oceanside Blvd. between Oceanside and Vista, it doesn’t look like a Gallery from the outside, and the opening hours are sporadic (Thurs-Sat 1-6, after mid-December by appointment only). But when I opened the door, I entered a sprawling art center, spread out over two floors, multiple rooms and open spaces. Primal Instincts is a group show curated by Chuck Thomas and Jason Clay Lewis featuring artists Kaori Fukuyama, Eva Struble, Irén Tété, Michael Hernandez, John Britton Hogan, Alexandra Carter, Hannah Pierce, Jesse Ring, and Kelly Witmer, as well as artists from the BEVERLY’S collective including Leah Dixon, Jack Henry, Maxx Wade, Tadashi Adamson, Morgan Mandalay, Jesus Antonio, and Maddie Butler.

There is enough space for each artist to display a selection of multiple artworks, all worth a closer look, but I will focus on the fifteen art pieces by Kaori Fukuyama, who gave me a tour through the art center.

            In an elaborate exposé, co-curator Jason Clay Lewis expounds on the title of the exhibition Primal Instincts. “In their own way, each artist alludes to the broader ramifications of the primal act of creation that is fundamental to all humanity.” Yes, all creativity is fundamentally human. Except, some animals create works of great beauty too, as the first artwork by Fukuyama in the entrance lobby demonstrates.  Undercurrent consists of hundreds of triangular pieces of colored film struck into foam board to look like tiny fins sticking out of water. The triangles have various colors, some two different ones on each side, and one side is reflective. The triangles reflect each other and the light shining on and through them. As I walked by, they changed colors from blue to red to yellow or transparent. Together they create a loop, a moving wave, swinging down, around, and up again.

During the Covid pandemic Fukuyama was inspired by the flight of starlings in the sky. How do they manage to configure a cohesive shape? How do they coordinate their flight pattern? Fukuyama told me that starlings only communicate with seven other birds around them. The vicinity of the wingspans, the wind flow of the other starlings allows them to form their flight configuration. The piece seems to move and flow as it changes colors constantly. A larger version of this piece was temporarily installed at the airport, and now found a home at City College.

            The same reception area contains a series of related paintings, Beginning 1 &2, Hidden Passage, and Hidden in Plain Sight. All feature various shades of blue in subtle graduations. Blue is the color of the sky or the sea, but to Fukuyama blue is also “the color that draws the viewer into the pictorial space.” Like a magnet, the viewer’s glance is sucked into the round blue circular center of the paintings. The surface is so smooth that I couldn’t see the transitions between the hues of blue. Fukuyama achieves this effect by applying very thin layers of paint, and letting them dry completely before applying the next layer on top of the other. She repeats this process, which can a month, until the desired image emerges and feels atmospheric, spacious and hypnotic. “Blue creates a space you can enter and hide,” says the artist.  In Hidden in Plain Sight, there is actually a very subtle square hidden within the circle. Barely noticeable, white on white, it forces viewers to look closer and longer, or else they miss it. An intention she shares with Robert Irwin, one of her favorite artists. One of the founders of the California Light & Space movement, he also wanted to entice viewers to spend a longer time discovering each art work.

Two paintings entitled Invitation to Infinity and Invitation to Mystery don’t feature circles but instead four triangles meeting on point in the center. They create an optical illusion.  

The square paintings with crossed lines in the center seem to lead into a pathway to infinity. In my mind I could switch back and forth between two ways of perception: either the vertical triangles are distant, and the horizontal ones are close, or vice versa.

The second invitation is like an envelope, or a square paper—blue on one and yellow on the other side—folded over to invite the viewer to a mystery (party). The viewer’s choice is whether to go to infinity or to a party.

            After walking through several gallery spaces and before climbing the stairs to the second floor, I arrived at the next series of Fukuyama’s pieces, five triangles entitled Against Gravity from 2022. These shaped wooded, or sharp-angled canvas triangles are arranged in space, and jut out from the wall into the space. They are three-dimensional like a relief, at the intersection between sculpture and painting.

“Where does sculpture end and painting begin?” Fukuyama asks. “The colors are most important,” she adds. Each triangle combines two colors, one for the main surface, and one for the rim. They are mostly complementary: turquoise and orange, yellow and green, green and purple, blue and yellow. Some of the triangles cantilever out from the wall and their second color can only be guessed from the faint color-shadow they cast on the white wall.

            Upstairs a final series of Fukuyama’s work becomes visible. Five works of folded canvas are origami inspired and refer to plants and flowers, such as Elm leaves, Irises, Bellflower, and Kniphofia or Red-Hot Poker, an orange, pointy flower with a yellow base. Fukuyama remembered how her grandmother liked to do origami in Japan and once gave her a bouquet of origami flowers. “I was definitely thinking about my grandmother when I did these pieces,” she said. First the canvas was painted flat and let completely dry. Then Fukuyama pressed them into the shapes she designed for each plant and kept them in shape with iron rods in the back, but they are still moldable. These were her most overtly nature inspired works.

            Nature always seems close to Fukuyama’s heart. In a public commission in the Arts District at Liberty Station in Point Loma, she created a large butterfly sculpture, a native garden, and educational messages designed to support Monarch butterflies. She refers to nature, but doesn’t imitate it. Her work is not overburdened with theory and explicit meaning but thoughtful and evocative. She works with perception, and our very Californian Light and Space, as her favorite artist James Turrell, Agnes Martin, and Robert Irwin have done. Like them, she would like us to slow down and take a second look, and maybe a third. What do we see? What do we see after the first look, and after the second or third? The viewer will be rewarded for looking closely and more carefully at Fukuyama’s work. There are more than three dimensions here to discover.

Techne Gallery Space 
1609 Ord Way
Oceanside, CA 92056
917-972-1752
Thursday-Saturday, 1-6pm
After mid-December by appointment only

All images by Kaori Fukuyama, Courtesy of Techne Art Gallery