Issei Fujita arrives in Italy during the year 1999. Until the 2005 he is engaged collaborating in the CARPE DIEM projects: among others are the projects SARTORIA and LINEA. The collaboration get interrupted during the same year.

After the experience Issei begin to develop an own project, where there is a first meeting of Light and Darkness. This project spring up as a collection of five t-shirt, which colors are impressed on the fabric through a process usually used in the develop of photos.

The words “Lumen” and “Umbra” relates to two aspects which are at the base of the phenomena of the world. Why it is that?
Because is thanks to the meeting of Darkness and Light that all the phenomena get visible. Forms and colors get life from the encounter and combination of the two.

To talk about an artistic project needs to talk about the art first.
To look on another aspect of the matter, this two reality of the world, Light and darkness can be seen as the soul living into the things (the light) and as the materia which is transformed by the soul (the matter). When this meeting happens a work is done to make possible the visible manifestation of the inner part of the substance: this happens through the manipulation and the transofmation of the materia into a form that reflects an ideal model. So darkness can also be seen as a veil, which overshadow the interiority of the things. So, what the man does through the creative action is a transformation of the non-formed materia, which allow him to be transformed and manipulated, and that see himself interiorly transformed too. Thanks to the contemplation of art, of a creation, the men can be awaken to the Beauty and its virtues.

Lumen can also mean a particular kind of light that has the possibility to bright the path of men now adays. That is, where umbra is the darkening of the system of nowadays that can take us to loose our true self. Finding one-self is to relate to a particular tradition. That doesn’t means that is impossible to the men to go forward, and that everything has to be the same as it was in the past. Tradition doesn’t mean something which stay in the past, separeted from the present. It means the spiritual content of a time that want to be carried, to descend upon the world in a time. So it is something that happens during every ages, in any time and that has naturally a relation with the older tradition. The forward is related to the rear, and the present and the future to the past. There cannot be a cut in timestream.

If we keep this view, we can see that art cannot generate or create something without having searched and found the ideas, the shapes, the ideal models, into the spiritual world. It is the spiritual world that show itself into a tradition, or a style of an age-time. So nothing can arise from the nothingness; at the same time nothing remains the same but evolves, changes. It’s thanks to the spiritual heritage of a tradition living in a time that a creation is possible. Creation of a life, of an idea, of a wood sculpture. So when someone open the sky of the mind, he allow to the spiritual content to come with his ideal models.

To talk about some ideal shapes which are characteristics of the Lumen et umbra project we can consider the one of the warrior.
Existence it is sometimes a challenge, an effort, an attempt, in which the qualities, the inner thruths of a man or woman fights to comes to daylight. In the east of the ancient Japan the warrior was in the guise of a samurai; in the medieval west it is known as a knight. Both of them are serving an ideal. Because an ideal to serve is needed to get strenght to accomplish a mission. Depending on the ideal we have a corespondent realization: so here we have a choice to make. This two shapes, they come from the same substance, and they get into our time in a different form, but still alive, existing: nowadays the knight, in whichever form, becomes a spiritual knight, the one who serve a spiritual ideal, without using violence anymore.

This journey, from an ancient world to the present, is the journey of the men that walks on the lands and continuously dress himself with new shapes: he transforms himself to get to the truth of himself and to understand the world around him. It is not a disguise of the body, but a camouflage of the soul that he does.

The life of the nomad, of the one which has no root, is dear to Lumen et umbra. His journey is seen as this adventure of the existence called human existence, with his dangers and possibilities, the obstacles and the lessons, which, however, recognizes the man who shows himself worthy of his task: to find the truth through researching himself, beyond the forms, to bring this truth to light through new forms that will show, this time, the interiority with no veils, the inner man.