Please introduce yourself.

I’m Shoji Funakawa and I’m an artist. I use light and sound a lot in my work, but I primarily focus on the elements of weather, and use my experience with the environment to create my works.

What would you like people to focus on when looking at your work?

Here at the BnA Alter Museum, you can see works of art while climbing the stairs, standing on the deck, or looking through the glass of the show windows. There are a lot of different ways to see art here. I interpret the flow of the guests as a kind of passing of time, a kind of playtime, so to speak. That passing of time is the base of my work and it’s like trying to immediately catch something that’s moving upwards or downwards. The flow of time is a peculiar experience, which even those looking at the work have experienced. I hope that they are able to focus on this special characteristic.

What made you make this piece and how did you come up with it?

The themes of my pieces usually have to do with weather, so I incorporate the environment into them. However, after taking into consideration the unique architecture of the BnA museum, and how guests would be walking by and looking at works through glass. I wanted to make a piece that wouldn’t be constrained to being indoors or outdoors. I wanted the experience of viewing this piece to be similar to the sensation of passing through time.

Is there anything you’d like to convey with this work?

I think it’s important for those looking at the piece to feel meaning and value from it. But even before that, I’d like them to really feel the flow of time from them looking at it. I spend time working on these pieces, and though some may not end up being finished, that time I spent is important. I think that the time spent observing a piece is the closest way for each and every guest to experience what I do when creating them. I would like everyone to have that experience.

Is there anything you focused or worked especially hard on in this one?

I made a kind of script in this piece. It can be read as a story or as statistics, but there’s also an aspect of me having made something that’s like a physical model of something. I’d say that my main focus for this was making something that wouldn’t just be looked at, but one that you could enter, touch, open, and have all kinds of different experiences with.

Could you speak more to time and its flow in this piece?

I thought that it’d be interesting to have time be connected with something very large. I was especially interested in weathering, since it’s something unique that time produces. I think there’s something about weathering that makes individual, specific materials not unique.
Within that flow of time, there’s a specific experience, but paradoxically, the flow of time makes it lose its individuality.
Through the flow of time, it continues to connect with other things and becomes something else. This change is not something you usually consider when focusing on large spaces. Time and how it flows within a space are the main points of this piece.

[Staircase, Gallery 2, Gallery 4]
“LuLu”
mixed media, 2025