ssues of separation and loneliness were thus deeply embedded in Fukawa's work before the birth of his second child, a son named Fumi, and the subsequent realization that Fumi is autistic. Fukawa undertook a thorough (and ongoing) study of his son's condition. As an artist he was now squarely positioned at the confluence of his previous intellectual investigations and his current reality.

Of the four installations that followed, two confronted autism directly and two dealt with the atom bomb. As disparate as these subjects might seem, one element they share from Fukawa's point of view is silence. In the case of autism, it is the inability of the afflicted individual to communicate. In the case of the atom bomb, it is the freak phenomenon experienced by a small percentage of witnesses to the initial test at the Trinity site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and to the detonation in Hiroshima a little less than a month later.

This phenomena was recorded by Japanese physician Dr. Michihiko Hachiya in the journal he kept for two months following the blast. In his August 9 entry, Dr. Hachiya writes: "Now, I could state positively that I heard nothing like an explosion when we were bombed the other morning, nor did I remember any sound during my walk to the hospital as houses collapsed around me. It was as though I walked through a gloomy silent motion picture. Others whom I questioned had had the same experience."

The title of Fukawa's 1995 installation at Kansas City's Grand Arts – Like an Ethereal Transfer – is from the writings of Birger Sellin, an autistic German man who does not speak, but who at age 18 began to use a typewriter to express his astonishingly coherent thoughts. His early writings are collected in the book I Don't Want to Be Inside Me Anymore: Messages from an Autistic Mind.

Figure 8

Figure 9

Fukawa engraved fragments of Sellin's text onto the surface of four marble slabs and filled the indented letters with mercury (Fig. 8). The slabs lay on the concrete floor of Grand Arts' main gallery. The mercury was not immediately evident as text – from an oblique angle, it appeared as a shimmering, tinsel code – but once the words came into focus their impact was as toxic as the mercury's poison vapor (Fig. 9).

The installation also included a rolling steel table that resembled the chilly, washable beds Fukawa had seen at a psychiatric-hospital museum in St. Joseph, Missouri (Fig. 10). A hole in the marble surface formed a kind ofoubliette for human waste, both physical and spiritual. A row of billiard balls symbolized the glass beads and marbles that Sellin runs through his fingers, mantra—like, when he is not writing, sleeping, or eating. The installation's final element was a silhouette of Fumi, life-size, projected in 1,000-watt white light on one of the gallery walls (Fig. 8).

Figure 10

Its site has been sown with salt and ichabod is written over the gate . . . was the name of Fukawa's 1996 installation at Kansas City's Park College. This was the final line of a letter written by U.S. Navy officer to his wife on Sept. 14, 1945. He was describing his impression of Hiroshima after the bomb.

Fukawa is fascinated by the officer's sophisticated pairing of biblical image: the repeated reference (Genesis, II Samuel, Lamentations) to salt as a poisonous agent, and the name Ichabod ("inglorious"), which was given by a mother dying in labor to her newborn child after the Philistine's first defeat of Israel: "And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel because the ark of God was taken" (I Samuel 4:21).

The installation was a simple but densely poetic take on the Hiroshima bombing, made of three parts: a video loop, a piece of symphonic music, and thousands of names drawn at random from the Kansas City phone book.

The central element was a wooden desk, constructed by Fukawa to resemble the two-person study carrel common in university libraries (Fig. 11). On one side of the desk a tiny video monitor displayed a slow, 360-degree scan of the horizon surrounding the Trinity site near Los Alamos, N.M. where the atomic bomb was first tested. On the opposite side of the desk, bracketing a small pile of desert sand, two small speakers transmitted Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" – the piece of music Voice of America was broadcasting during the formation of the first atomic fireball (Fig. 12).

Figure 11

Figure 12

Approximately 210,000 people were killed by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the installation's duration, Fukawa assigned himself and his assistants the task of typing this number of names out of the Kansas City phone book. He saw the action as a way for the typists to absorb into their minds and bodies – and to share with the viewers – an awareness of the death count's reality. At the rate of 108 names in three columns per page, this listing would have consumed 1,945 pages. Completed pages were tacked to the gallery wall each day; blank pages waiting to receive names remained in a pile on the desk's top shelf.

ukawa returned to the subject of autism in his 1998 installation at the Huntington Gallery at Boston's Massachusetts College of Art. The subject of Adrift in the Sea of Tranquility was not Fukawa's son Fumi, but an older autistic girl named Erika, whom Fukawa met in the early 90s when he and the girl's mother, Eri Haneshi, were part of a group working collectively to understand and aid their children.

The centerpiece was a headless female figure, approximately 16-feet high (Fig. 13). The torso was a bronze casting of a dressmaker's form, with a tiny video monitor embedded in its breast. The monitor displayed a looped recording Fukawa had made of Erika interacting with her mother. The torso sat atop a wire cage resembling a hoop skirt. The figure rotated slowly, almost imperceptibly, completing one revolution every 15 minutes.

Figure 13

Ten pairs of steel stanchions were spaced randomly around the central form (Fig. 14). Each set of stanchions supported a string, and clinging to each string was a small, battery-powered, cable car. Emitting subtle, struggling noises, the toy cars inched along their strings until they bumped into the metal supports; then they stopped with a shudder, reversed, and began their pointless traverse in the opposite direction.

Radiating from the torso's neck to the gallery's four walls were 40 pairs of golden speaker wires. The tent-like array glinted in fragments of sunlight and, like an enormous, near-transparent wedding veil, graced the gallery with a reverent, religious aura. Suspended from these wires at ear height were small, round, uncased speakers, spaced equidistantly, ten to a wall. The speakers carried a quiet reading of a dialogue between Fukawa and Haneshi. Each ratchet of the central form's rotation tripped the amplifier signal from one set of speakers to another, causing pieces of the dialogue to lurch unpredictably around the room.

Figure 14

Fukawa was asking Haneshi about simple things – "Did you have any trouble with Erika yesterday?" "When Erika plays with a keyboard, how does she play?" "How many words does Erika use each day?" – as well as about more personal issues, familiar only to those with an intimate understanding of the difficulties faced by an autistic child's parents – "Have you hit Erika?" "When do you feel the most love toward Erika?" and "What is Erika to you?"

To the last question, Haneshi answered, "She is my fate. Pleasure as well as agony. A person who motivates as well as discourages me."

Fragments of the dialogue were printed in vertical and horizontal lines on the wall of the balcony overlooking the main gallery space. The lines crossed, like a crossword puzzle, where common letters intersected. Here, too, the phrases Fukawa selected ranged from practical to poignant: "Her most favorite part is opening the box of detergent." "Erika said 'ee,' which is 'eat.'" "She did not recognize me, went up to another child's mother." Similar to his projection of Fumi in the Grand Arts' installation, a full-scale silhouette of Erika appeared in white-light to the right of the printed phrases, as if she were only shyly present.

Two telescopes aimed at the height of the video monitor in the torso breast were mounted at the balcony's edge, and a cassette player with headphones hung from each telescope stand. It was only from this vantage point, distant and awkward, that a viewer could listen to the complete dialogue and watch the videotape – and then only when the central figure had rotated into the right position.

A slide projection of the moon's dry, gray surface raked across the ceiling above the installation. The Sea of Tranquility is one of the moon's dark regions, thought by ancient astronomers to be oceans. Fukawa says that he thinks of his son and his friend's daughter as being just as distant and as misunderstood. "Erika is right there in front of me but also so far away. So close but so far away."

For his most recent exhibition of new work – After Trinity, at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1998 – Fukawa cast eight lead crystal models of an atomic fire ball (Fig. 15). He chose this number because while thirteen countries are assumed to have the bomb, only eight have officially acknowledged it. He spaced the crystal pieces across the gallery's pale wood floor and illuminated them with small halogen lights filtered through red gels (Fig. 16).

Figure 15

Figure 16

A 13-foot-wide x 10-foot-high still image of the Trinity site was presented at one end of the gallery as a mosaic of 196 computer print-outs. At the gallery's other end a small video monitor displayed the same slow, panoramic view of the Trinity site as appeared in the Park College installation, this time accompanied by a looped audio "collage." Using a twelve-track sound tape, Fukawa "stacked" speeches by Harry Truman and Robert Oppenheimer, audio interviews with various people who had worked on or near the Trinity site during the bomb's development, and the sound of the first explosion itself, digitally extended from the mere seconds it lasted in real time to the seven-minute length of the audio tape.

hough Fukawa's body of work is saturated with content, it remains firmly fixed in the conceptual realm. It succumbs to none of the failings modernism's anti-narrative strictures sought to avoid. With reference again to a Japanese garden, these installations appear to have evanesced into existence out of a reading of nature that encompasses collective historical memory and the individual soul.

In 1971, an interviewer asked Joseph Beuys if he was proposing "a sort of 'Socratic space' in which the works are a pretext for a dialogue with man." Beuys replied, "This is the most important aspect of my work... Art interests me only insofar as it gives me the possibility of a dialogue with man."

Whether addressing generalities like loneliness and isolation, or specifics like autism and the atom bomb, Fukawa creates similar "Socratic spaces." While his installations unquestionably bear the weight of his own conscious and subconscious associations, they are at the same time fully open to interpretation by other, individual worlds of experience. By relying on his intuition as his primary medium, Fukawa provokes viewers into exercising their own.