n a 1974 essay about female realist painters, critic Linda Nochlin notes that "fear of content... has marked the most extreme phases of the modern movement."

Fear of content. How strange and yet true that one of modernism's strictest prohibitions was against any trace of narrative in the visual arts, or as Nochlin describes it, "the production of meaning."

This prohibition was not without reason. The danger for any artist who attempts to incorporate meaning into his or her work is that it won't mean enough – that it will be too minor, trivial, or stale to interest anyone else.

Several of the young British artists represented in the recent "Sensation" exhibition sidestep this pitfall by narrowing in on the incontestable content of their own lives. Tracy Emin muses in multiple media about her sexual history. Richard Billingham photographs his freakish family. Ron Mueck offers a three-foot replica of his father's corpse cast in lifelike silicone and acrylic (he's currently working on a 50-foot sculpture of his mother). If these portrayals happen to resonate with viewers, so be it, but they lay no claim to the universal.

By contrast, the Japanese sculptor Hirokazu Fukawa has assembled a body of work over the last decade that addresses issues as topical as autism and the atom bomb.

Perhaps because he is a Japanese sculptor in an English-speaking environment, Fukawa's primary medium is his intuition. On a visual, visceral level, his marriage of traditional sculptural materials to advanced media is unnerving and seductive. On an intellectual, metaphoric level, his installations plunge deep into issues both personally and universally significant.

he 45-year-old Fukawa, currently an assistant professor at the University of Hartford, began his career in Japan as a graphic artist. During a summer residency in Banff, Alberta, after he had built so much weight and dimension onto his paintings that they could no longer hang on the wall, he began to experiment with site-specific environmental works. In 1988 he entered the graduate program in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has since pursued his work as a sculptor in the United States.

"Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long, David Nash – those artists who work outside of town, who go to nature – influenced me pretty strongly," Fukawa recalls. "I was born and raised in Tokyo, but in Banff I learned to react to the natural environment. It was relatively easy to use intuition. I didn't have to think: What does this brushstroke mean? Why do I have to go abstract? Or representational? That kind of decision-making wasn't necessary because I could react directly to nature and also to a knowledge of anthropology. From my point of view now the work I did in Banff is kind of naïve but at the time it came together naturally. I didn't struggle. I did a quick sketch and it was there."

The sculptures and installations born of this intuitive method have the surprising, kinetic balance of a Japanese garden. And like a Japanese garden, which is designed to provide a different experience in each of the four seasons, Fukawa's works allow for a variety of interpretations.

Figure 1

An early sculpture contains the essence of his aesthetic and the seeds of his future work. A bronze casting of a pelican's head rests on luscious red velvet in a highly polished bronze box (Fig. 1). The lid of the box is tilted back, its mirrored surface reflecting the viewer's face. Etched on the lid are the lines: "I love you madly. / I love you madly. / I love you madly. / Three times."

This peculiar, wordy, seemingly corny phrase is one of more than a dozen small texts that appear in Fukawa's subsequent works. "I started picking up some stupid, banal words," he explained in a recent interview. "I call them 'love whispers.' It's embarrassing to say these things out loud. Nobody really says, 'I love you, madly.' People say, 'I love you,' but 'madly' gives it a slightly embarrassing, naïve context."

At the time, in addition to the pelican's head, Fukawa had collected a tortoise shell, the skull of a baby deer, and the bodies of a hummingbird, a woodpecker, several Japanese hornets, and two salmon. Exploring these objects' potential as sculptural media, he cast the tiny hummingbird in lead, applied thin lead sheet to the surface of the tortoise shell, and salted and preserved the salmon. He made painstakingly exact pencil portraits of the organic remnants. He thought about language.

"For some reason I really wanted to use language, probably because of my language problem. My English was really bad. I'm not a poet. I started thinking about a dead body. The body is mute. It doesn't have words. But the language it spoke is still floating in the air. If it could be recorded in a written format or on tape, the language itself would exist like a dead body. Used by a live person, the words would come alive, but if you monumentalize them, like sandblasting them onto bronze or mirror, they aren't alive, they're mummified. I realized that words could be alive or dead, not metaphorically, but literally . . . dead words vs. living words. So my choice of 'love whispers' was some kind of reaction to the animals' dead bodies."

"People who came to see this piece [the bronze pelican head in the box] saw their own faces and the love whispers and the dead animal. Love, death, and the face of the viewer, who was still alive."

For his first major one-man exhibition, I want to feel the way you do, all the time. You want to feel the way I do, all the time, at the Pittsburgh Center for Art in 1991, Fukawa mounted salted trout and mullet (more than 100 of each) on individual steel posts in schooling patterns directed toward two rows of five video monitors (Fig. 2). Four of the monitors observed by the trout played a continuous loop of a river, four of the monitors observed by the mullet played a loop of an ocean, and the fifth monitor in each array broadcast CNN.

Figure 2

"I had just finished Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media. I saw Bill Viola's video tapes in Santa Barbara, and I couldn't verbalize why his work was so good, why it so impressed me, but I wanted to learn. I was very conscious of how poor I was as a video artist. I knew I couldn't do the technical things. So I made a kind of minimal video – I set the camera on the tripod and shot for two hours. It's like Warhol's 60's videos – two hours of the same thing – but the point wasn't the same. Even though my videos of the ocean and the river seem like looking through a window at the outside world – like the most minimal, basic information – they're very manipulated. For the ocean, I chose a view without any islands or boats on a completely clear day. The television image, CNN, is like another window onto the outside, continuously broadcasting the information of the world, but this view, of course, is also very manipulated."

n 1994 Fukawa installed Love me in your full being in the two-room Hewlett Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. A large steel object that a local critic compared to a kitchen whisk - four 20-foot lengths of solid rod curved into U-shapes and welded together at their apices - dominated the center of the first room (Fig. 3). Fukawa spent four months hand-stamping the words of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience onto the surface of the rods (three bands of 3/16" text per rod for a total of more than 15,000 characters). The object rested on its domed end, canted several degrees from vertical. Fifteen mirrors varying in size from 36" x 36" to 48" x 72" leaned against the walls. Individual "love whispers" were sandblasted into each mirror's surface, including, "You are the first skin around me," "You are the only real truth I know," and "Thorns are the best part of your love."

Figure 3

In the adjacent room, Fukawa installed a steel staircase with tempered-glass treads (Fig. 4). The top tread was a mirror plate etched with the words, "Love me in your full being," and the statement made by Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Lenov as he reflected on the experience of walking in deep space: "It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body" (Fig. 5). An inverted tortoise shell filled with the ashes of a burned Japanese-English dictionary rested on a corner shelf near the top stair. Five inverted wine bottles mounted in a row on wall brackets were sandblasted with the phrase, "I / MISS / YOU / LIKE / HELL." A video that alternated between 20 minutes of two turtles swimming in a water tank (Fig. 6) and several seconds of the flaming dictionary (Fig. 7) projected continuously onto a 11-foot by 15-foot screen that was visible in both rooms. Figure 6 Figure 7

Figures 4&5