Artist: Kiyomi Fukui
Exhibition: The Green Thumb Project
Media: Photography, plants
Website: http://www.kiyomifukui.com/
About the Artist
Kiyomi Fukui is an artist that lives in Long Beach. She is a Japanese-American who understands the discrimination that people face in their lives and works to express insecurities and emotions that people face. Her father is a Zanichi and has faced discrimination that she is aware of. She acquired a MFA in printmaking in CSULB and also has a BFA in Graphic design from La Sierra University. She works trying to display insecurities, which makes her work more uncomfortable and different to other people. She wants people to embrace insecurities and change in order to see beauty even if it may cause some pain.
Formal Analysis
Kiyomi Fukui’s project, The Green Thumb Project, uses a paper mold that she makes of thumbs and different plants to make them grow into the shape of a thumb. This art project is a difficult one to work with as the plants continue to grow or die and change throughout it. This project focuses on the stages of the plant’s growth as it takes the shape of the thumb mold, but has many other important parts to it. The thumbs look weird as they are growing out of a mold of a thumb. She grows them by placing the seeds into a paper mold of a thumb.
Content Analysis
To Fukui, this project is a memory of her mother as she took the mold of her thumb before she passed. She focuses on the thumbs as they grow or die and works on perfecting her ability of having a green thumb. She does this because it is a way for her to heal and move forward with the loss of her mother. She knows that loss is something that will always come but the ways to heal are all unique. This was a personal project for her as it has a lot of sentimental value. As Kiyomi Fukui said in her description of The Green Thumb Project, “Loss is universal, but healing comes in many forms. I hope to reflect one form of healing here, where the coping from loss is merged with daily life activity producing further feelings to feel.”
My Experience
I found this project to be weird and interesting. I have not seen anything like it before and was thrown off by the molds of the thumbs. I was unaware that they were supposed to be thumbs at first but understood it the more I looked at it. I enjoyed the reasoning for the project and the meaning behind it. It is disappointing that I do not have more to information other than what was on her page but hope I was able to convey enough information on what her project meant.
Makalo Taddwilliams Art 