ARTIST MAKOTO FUJIMURA uses materials and techniques from nihonga, a Japanese style of painting. The pigments are pulverized minerals and precious metals applied in multiple layers, in what he describes as “a slow process that fights against efficiency.” Prayer and contemplation are woven into the work. The tiny mineral particles refract light, often creating subtle prismatic effects. It is a style of art made for the type of long, unforced gaze that slowly reveals evermore depth. Deceptively simple and quietly extravagant.
Fujimura’s thoughts on art, theology, and culture are, like his paintings, many-layered and refractive, celebrating God as love, beauty, and mercy while also contending with pain and desolation. He is a mystic as well as a painter, and in his latest book, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, he speaks out of his spiritual and his artistic practice.
But Fujimura also builds on three decades of reaching far outside his studio to evangelize on the necessity of art for human thriving and the call to shift from fighting over culture to caring for and nurturing it. He founded the International Arts Movement in 1992, which facilitates connections and communication between groups seeking to creatively and positively impact the culture, whether they are from the arts, music, business, education, or social change organizations.
The “theology of making” Fujimura explores in his book centers on theologian N.T. Wright’s proposal that the resurrection of Jesus sparked “the unexpected launch of new creation, of the ‘kingdom of God,’ on earth as in heaven” and that humans are equipped and invited to work with God in advancing this new reign. (Wright wrote the foreword to Art and Faith.)
“God created beyond utility or need. God is all sufficient, and self-sufficient. In short (shockingly) God does not need us!” Fujimura told Sojourners. “Yet God chooses community over isolation, gratuitous creation over passivity. God invites us to co-labor toward the new.”
Consider the lilies of the field
Fujimura has at times seemed like a shuttle diplomat, moving between the church, arts institutions, and academic settings, attempting to negotiate an end—or at least a broad truce—to ongoing battles over culture, art, values, meaning, and even truth itself. He has long advocated that culture, rather than being territory to be conquered, is a “garden to tend ... an ecosystem to steward.”
This is an especially idealistic vision in our contentious and battered era, when whole segments of the church appear to be permanently entrenched in battle mode. Fujimura does not mince words about the damage Christians have done to culture and to their own witness.
“God is love,” Fujimura said. “Therefore, we followers of Christ must be all about love. Yet the church is seen as the sowers of hatred, divisiveness, and the power struggles of culture wars. We are projecting the opposite characteristics of the fruits of the spirit.” He would remind us of Jesus’ exhortations to “look at the birds of the air” and “consider the lilies of the field” (Matthew 6:26, 28).
“We see extravagance of abundance everywhere in nature, and the delights of God hidden everywhere for us to discover,” said Fujimura. “Yet Christians fight culture wars as if the only path is to ‘defend our turf’—to war over scarcity-ridden, limited-resource environments.”
As an artist, Fujimura believes that “God’s purposes transcend way beyond our industrial, utilitarian pragmatism. God loves beauty and mercy exactly because they stand as antidote to the Darwinian mechanism of the ‘survival at all costs’ mindset that became normative for us after the Fall.”
This does not mean that the answer to our warring ways is a breezy “all you need is love” approach. Nor is the solution a facile peace that is won by papering over the damage done by power- or fear-driven societal conflicts or insists that art (or faith) must avoid pain or contention. Fujimura speaks often about trauma, personal and public. He knows that human imagination and creativity can produce weapons of mass destruction as well as transcendent beauty. (He speaks of his maternal grandfather, sent by the Japanese government in 1945 to survey the damage done to Hiroshima by the atomic bomb dropped on the city by the United States, and how his grandfather would not speak of what he’d seen for the rest of his life.)
In a 2019 commencement speech at Judson University, Fujimura named some of the losses, evils, and traumatic events of that pre-COVID-19 time: “We see the fire that ravaged Notre Dame, we are numbed by another suicide bomber, perhaps haunted, as I am, of the white sepulchers of coral reefs in precious oceans. We witness the destruction of all ideologies of hope in politics. We roll our eyes at the scandals involving leaders in the world and in the church.”
So while Fujimura proclaims a God who “renews and generates,” he is also very clear: The path toward the New Creation, he writes in Art and Faith, “weaves through the brokenness of our world, our own lives, and the fissures created by various factions of faith institutions.”
Behold the painful broken fragments
Fujimura is a student of kintsugi—“golden repair”—the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with precious metals, restoring a bowl or cup to wholeness and function while highlighting, rather than masking, the fractures. Objects repaired by kintsugi masters are often stunningly beautiful, veined with gold, silver, or platinum that trace a history of traumatic destruction and sublime redemption.
But behind each Instagram-ready bowl is a practice and tradition that doesn’t begin with the gold, but with the shards.
Kintsugi masters sometimes handed down a set of fragments through generations, contemplating the pieces—their beauty, their patina from use—for decades before beginning the repair, which itself might take years.
Likewise, we are invited to look with compassion and love on broken lives and broken systems as the starting point of repair, reform, or healing. “I actually think that there is virtue in being able to see the brokenness and fractures, as painful as they may be,” said Fujimura. Through the pandemic and other disasters of the past year, he noted that “we are given clear vision to see the reality beneath the facades of institutional power and leadership that have betrayed God’s design.” The lesson he draws from Japanese aesthetic values, his own experience of trauma, and the gospel itself is that “we must first learn to behold even those painful broken fragments as beautiful,” rather than rush to fix everything or hide the damage.
“This is not a cosmetic, Western notion of beauty,” he clarified, “but beauty accentuated by care of nature and our communities—beauty based on sacrifice, which I believe the Japanese aesthetic has refined.” Western culture tends to emphasize tossing out broken things and replacing them with something new, or hiding the damage. “A Western path of ‘fixing’ assumes that the fractures are no longer seen, and the object looks as if nothing has happened,” Fujimura explained, a contrast with a Japanese aesthetic that values wear and tear. Likewise, “the Western teaching of the gospel has been disguised as ‘return to Eden’ perfection.”
In Fujimura’s reading of the gospels, the good news comes with scars. He cites how Jesus still has his wounds post-resurrection (see John 20, Thomas’ encounter with Jesus). “We can assume that the New Creation flows out of these sacred wounds,” he said.
Trauma and the tears of Christ
Fujimura writes in Art and Faith that for several years he has meditated during Lent on chapters 11 and 12 of John’s gospel. In chapter 11, Jesus is summoned to the home of his friends Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus, who is sick. By the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus is dead and already laid in a tomb. Surrounded by grief and confronting death and decay, Jesus, scripture says, is deeply moved and cries. Fujimura makes the somewhat surprising assertion that “Jesus wept” (John 11:35) is the pivotal verse for his “theology of making.”
He writes that he sees in this verse “the entire narrative of the Genesis Creation story collapse into small droplets flowing down the Savior’s cheeks. God created in love, but by that same love, Christ wept.”
Fujimura told Sojourners, “Jesus’ tears are wasteful. He will, moments later, resurrect Lazarus, so why did he bother to ‘waste his time’ to weep with Mary? Because Jesus cares to give his tears to co-join with our suffering.”
For Fujimura, “art can be a way to tap into that mystery of Christ’s intervention,” whether in the presence of beauty or of utter devastation.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Fujimura was in a subway train headed to lower Manhattan when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Subway service halted at that point, but the stopped train was close enough that the passengers could feel the first tower falling before the MTA sent the train several blocks north to safety. When Fujimura emerged both towers were gone; he lived very near the World Trade Center and did not know if his family was safe. They were soon reunited, but like so many others, they were traumatized.
In his Judson University address, Fujimura spoke of what came next: “After 9/11, I had to train my imagination by painting over and over images of fire. I needed to transform haunting memories and images of destructive fire into the fire of sanctification.”
Part of his pain, Fujimura told Sojourners, was the realization that his children would be “Ground Zero children,” that they too would be always marked by seeing the 9/11 attack and its aftermath.
Jesus wept. Jesus weeps.
“I had to draw upon these tears of Christ,” he said. “I invoked them literally, by remembering them into my water-based, handmade paint, believing that in microscopic residues, Christ’s tears have multiplied into the very water that I am using.” Fujimura was commissioned by Crossway publishers to create art for The Four Holy Gospels, a special edition of the four canonical gospels in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011. “The entire project—five major paintings, 89 illuminated chapter head letters, 148 pages of embellishments—was focused on painting the illuminations with Christ’s tears,” he said.
Exuberant creation and outrageous beauty
How is an art-shaped theology relevant to those of us who do not paint (much less paint with Christ’s tears), sculpt, or sing?
“Artists tend to be ‘border-stalkers,’” according to Fujimura, “traversing often marginalized and dangerous territories.” They may move on the fringes of “respectable” society or move between very different institutions. Because they are willing to see beyond the norms and strictures of a given community or subculture, they can, Fujimura writes, “take in the vista of the wider pastures of culture.” He believes non-artists can learn to do this as well—retrain their imaginations to break boundaries and make new connections. For Christians this may mean trusting that the Holy Spirit is moving not just through our actions or intellect but through our intuition and imagination.
Fujimura notes that “since the Industrial Revolution, how we view the world, how we educate, and how we value ourselves have been all about purposeful efficiency.” Yet God, he insists, is more concerned with exuberant creation and outrageous beauty than with “usefulness” and metrics. (One could note that neither Jesus nor the prophets were especially concerned about pragmatism.)
“The church needs to become a maker of the new again,” he said. That will require artists and others ready to let their imaginations roam free.
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