L.A. Louver is pleased to present a new online viewing room titled Gajin Fujita: Drawings, launching today. Fujita’s unique practice brings together wildly diverse styles, cultures, and time periods in riotous compositions that proudly affirm the artist’s own Los Angeles roots. Blending graffiti styling with Edo-period Japanese aesthetics, Fujita’s work simultaneously tells two sides of his own story: a teenage tagger from Boyle Heights associated with the KGB and KIIS crews; and the son of Japanese immigrants, both artists, who was introduced to traditional Japanese art and craft at an early age.
Fujita’s core medium is spray paint. He uses intricate stencils to achieve complex compositions on panel; these stencils, now flush with overspray and heavy with sketches and personal notes, are affixed to a paper support and signed by the artist as finished studies. The paper works retain ghost images of what appears in the paintings; they are elegant, spare negatives of the painted image.