Renowned artist and writer Makoto Fujimura is not shy about the importance of his latest project. "Whether I like it or not, this is what I will be remembered by," Fujimura asserts.

"I don't think it's an overstatement to say that it is a commission of the decade, if not more," says Valerie Dillon, whose Manhattan-based Dillon Gallery is Fujimura's main exhibitor.

Crossway Publishing has commissioned Fujimura to create an illuminated manuscript to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of the King James Bible. This leather-bound English Standard Version of the Bible, set to be released January 2011, will be printed with a six-color metallic process and will comprise the four Gospels as designed and illustrated by Fujimura. Five major new works, painted in the artist's Manhattan studio, will be the volume's main images, making this the first such manuscript to feature abstract contemporary art in lieu of traditional representational illustrations. It is this unprecedented marriage of a modern, usually secular art form with ancient Scripture that most interests Fujimura, who aims to depict "the greater reality that the Bible speaks of ... for the pure sake of integrating faith and art in our current pluralistic, multicultural world."

The artist is quintessentially multicultural. Born in Boston to Japanese parents, Fujimura lived in three countries before the age of 10. While attending school in Japan and the U.S., he met and married an American woman, then became a New Yorker. He is both culturally and literally bilingual, but he also traverses the deeper divide between the art world and the church. As an artist and a Christian rather than a Christian artist, Fujimura is defined by the very juxtapositions this Bible will display.

Fujimura's work also fits the commission. As a student of Nihonga, a Japanese technique dating to the eighth century, Fujimura and his classmates at the Tokyo University of Fine Art set out to "[break] with tradition in order to revitalize and expand the art form," according to Dillon.