Born in Sakai in 1936, Fukuoka was a professor of fine arts at Kansai University.[2] He began his career in the 1950s by making plaster casts of holes he had dug in sand.[3] In the 1960s, he created a series of sculptures resembling balloons floating in the air.[3] In the 1970s, Michio Fukuoka produced gigantic sculptures of moths in different positions.[3] In the 1980s, he became more focused on self-portraits in landscapes, in which he was gardening or fishing.[3] He also created a series of wooden boxes his size, which represented coffins.[3] In the 1990s, he created black plastic panels on which he engraved the same sentence hundreds of times in white.[3] In the 2000s, he sculpted the "Rotten Balls", which vaguely represented testicles.[3] In 2005, he retired from sculpting.[4]
Fukuoka died on 15 November 2023, at the age of 87.[5]