HiroKazu Fukawa

Fukawa’s work focuses on his journey deep into the story of his father. Fukawa’s father was a soldier in the Japanese army during World War II. He was a sniper. Near the end of the war, his commander replaced each soldier’s rifle with a land mine and ordered them to suicide bomb an enemy’s tank. No tank approached, and when the war ended, Fukawa’s father was sent to a POW camp in Siberia, where he spent most of his young manhood. As a youth, Fukawa learned bits and pieces of his reticent father’s past, but not the whole story. Four years ago, Fukawa decided to find out more with the intention of using what he learned for a new art exhibition. He went on two research trips. The first trip was to Japan and Northeastern China, where his father spent his youth and fought during World War II. The second trip was to Siberia. Fukawa’s original intention was to create a riddle for the viewer out of his father’s past, and to explore the connections his own father’s story had to those of modern suicide bomber attacks. Fukawa received a BA in Social Science from Waseda University, Tokyo, and a diploma in Graphic Design from Junior College of Musashino Art University, Tokyo and an MFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently an associate professor of art at the University of Hartford in Hartford, Connecticut.