Hiroshige Fukuhara “Codex Variabilis”
Dates: Monday, May 12, 2025 – Tuesday, June 10, 2025, 9:00 – 1600 Open daily
Venue: OM Art x Music (735-3 Higashishioji-cho, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto, Kyoto)
Organizer: OM Art x Music Gallery
The exhibition Codex Variabilis (Codex Variabilis) is a project that attempts a visual reinterpretation of the poem “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake. The poem’s multiple prophecies and the interplay of opposing concepts, such as innocence and violence, beauty and destruction, continue to have strong meaning in our time. In the age of information overload, these meanings are further extended as “variabilis.
Rather than quoting the poem itself, this exhibition extracts the symbolic fragments contained in each paragraph and reorganizes them as structured visual motifs. Specifically, we have created a unique typeface that transforms the verse of the poem into the form of an alphabet, and the letters themselves into sculptural images. This is not mere design manipulation, but rather an act of reconstructing a visual and physical “poem” based on the premise that the meaning of language can be transformed through structure and form.
The message depicted by this alphabet is composed of words seemingly unrelated to “The Omen of Innocence. However, because the letter forms themselves contain poetic structures and symbols, the viewer will experience both displacement and resonance between the superficial message and the poetic reverberations that resonate behind it. In this way, words are reconfigured from “tools” for conveying meaning to “beings” that contain meaning, and become subject to new interpretations.
In this exhibition, the entire text of “The Omen of Innocence” is given to the AI as a Literary Corpus to learn the poem’s worldview, from which a fictional character is generated. Even though this person is not visually depicted, the process of creation structurally incorporates the symbolism and imagery of the poem. Then, by reconstructing the figure through Voronoi division, it is presented as a mere “collection of meanings” in which lines and planes are vaguely interlaced. Here, the generativity of AI and the mathematical structure intersect, and an attempt is made to visualize the essence of the poem as a “distribution.
Throughout the exhibition, the pairs of language (text) and vision (image), poetry (poetry) and code (code), innocence (innocence) and artifice (artifice) intersect and appear as mutually fluctuating and inverted structures. Codex Variabilis” is not a book with a fixed meaning, but a symbol of the never-ending process of transformation in which poems are broken down into alphabets, letters become images, and images are translated back into language. It is a symbol of the never-ending process of transformation.
From the post-structuralist viewpoint that “meaning” emerges not in the written word itself, but in the act and relationship of reading and deciphering it, this exhibition aims to create a “place” for this very act. We hope that you will see how the meaning of the poem “The Sign of Innocence” is transformed and reconstructed, and how it emerges in the present age, along with the echoes of the poem.
Hiroshige Fukuhara
1975 Born in Osaka
1997 BA, Osaka University of Arts
2018 Singularity University Exective Program, CA
lives and works in Tokyo
Solo Exhibitions
2016 “Modulation” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2013 “instantiation” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2012 “Recursion” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2010 “Binary” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
Group Exhibitions
2012 “New Gallery × New Artists × New Works” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2011 “Gallery artists’ show 2011” AI KOWADA GALLERY, Tokyo
2001 “BUZZ CLUB: News From Japan” PS1 MoMA Contemporary Art Center, NY
“media message: look thru language” Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, Japan
1997 “Philip Morris Art Award #1: Final Selection” Spiral Hall, Tokyo
Art Fairs
2013 “The Armory Show 2013” Solo Show, New York, USA
2012 “The Armory Show 2012” New York, USA
2010 “PULSE MIAMI 2010” Miami, USA
2010 “PULSE New York 2010” New York, USA
Artist Statement
I believe that what we call “existence” is so delicate and elusive that its very presence often feels uncertain. Yet, in the fleeting moment when a newly-bloomed flower falls, I find countless narratives held within that fragile sliver of time.
It may be because I sense that even if each event is not particularly special, the world is constantly transforming through the continuous processes of connection, layering, and repetition. Variables, functions, arrays, parameters, and methods – to me, they not only resemble programming I wish to perceive the world as a system: something structured, yet I wish to perceive the world as a system: something structured, yet replayable.
Like a beautiful flower that withers, only to bloom again the following year – time brings about change, and although the scenery may appear I find meaning in this subtle transformation of context over time. The space between past and present – that is where I locate my sense of “now,” and with it, my sense of existence.
Through my work, I seek to read the subtle shifts of context – quietly inscribed within the ordinary, yet constantly evolving – by translating them into visual systems that echo both fragility and logic. by translating them into visual systems that echo both fragility and logic.
– Hiroshige Fukuhara
Web site : https://invisi.com/
Artsy : https://www.artsy.net/artist/hiroshige-fukuhara
maharam : https://www.maharam.com/maharam/collaborators/fukuhara-hiroshige