Gallery: Water Flames

Golden Fire II  was commissioned for a museum tour Nihonga exhibit in Japan (To-ki-Michi, A Survey of Contemporary Nihonga, Ueno Royal Museum, Hakodate Museum, Ishikawa Prefectural Museum, and twelve other museums throughout Japan). Fujimura continues the theme of "Fires of destruction and sanctification" that he began with Water Flames. Golden Fire II is on museum tour throughout Japan currently.

Golden Fire was exhibited in 2007 in Chelsea, New York City.  It is in the background of Ibarra&Fujimura: Live Painting in New York. Greg Wolfe wrote:  

That the culminating work to this sequence should be a monumental piece entitled “Golden Fire” has a sort of epic inevitability about it.  Gold is the quintessential element we think of as requiring the refiner’s fire.  It is a heavy substance that somehow lifts into what the writer Milan Kundera has called “the unbearable lightness of being.”  This element, found deep within the earth and created thought he turbulent processes of change, becomes something that symbolizes the eternal and unchanging.  Gold is the possession of kings, and yet we often speak of the common person as having a heart full of it.