The philosophy that primes Jun Fukukawa's work, a combination of painting and sculpture, is a blast from the recent past. Fukukawa is inspired by the writings of Carlos Castaneda, particularly the book "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge" whose hallucinatory Indian mystical experiences informed a whole generation of hippies in the late 1960s and '70s and popularized the practice of shamanistic rituals in every commune.
Many great artists from the Surrealists through to Joseph Beuys, Mark Rothko, Mike Kelly and even the reticent Ilya Kabakov have assumed the role of the shaman in their art. Susan Sontag explains in her essay "The Pornographic Imagination" that if in the last century art has been invested with an unprecedented stature ("the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society") it is because one of the tasks some artists have taken up is to make risky trips to the outer reaches of normal consciousness and report back what is there.
To fascinate and enthrall audiences, not merely to educate or entertain them has "made the exemplary modern artist a broker in madness," to inform "regular" people of what is out there, without their having to make the trip themselves. How worthwhile the artistic results from this experience are depends on the authenticity of the work and how it touches on the viewers' own humanity.