Artist of the day: Artist of the day, February 12, 2020: Kishio Suga, a Japanese contemporary sculptor, and installation artist (#915)

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Artist of the day, February 12, 2020: Kishio Suga, a Japanese contemporary sculptor, and installation artist (#915)

Kishio Suga (1944), is a Japanese sculptor and installation artist currently living in Itō, Shizuoka, Japan. He is one of the key members of Mono-ha, a group of artists who became prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Mono-ha artists explored the encounter between natural and industrial materials, such as stone, steel plates, glass, light bulbs, cotton, sponge, paper, wood, wire, rope, leather, oil, and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. The works focus as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves.

From 1964 to 1968, he was a student in the painting department at Tama Art University in Tokyo. During this period, two artists who taught at the university were important influences on Suga. Yoshishige Saito encouraged Suga to take a deconstructive approach to modernism and Euro-American-centric art theory. Another influential teacher was the artist Jiro Takamatsu.

Suga’s early work reflected this approach. In his first solo exhibition (1968), Suga presented Space Transformation, a freestanding structure of red-painted wood that gave the illusion of a stack of boxes collapsing under their own weight.

At the same time as Suga was producing these illusionistic paintings and sculptures, he was already shifting to an engagement with raw materials in works such as Layered Space (1968), a transparent acrylic box containing layers of sawdust, cotton, ashes, plastic dust, and soil.

In the second half of 1968, this exploration of raw materials, ephemerality and space gained recognition as a broader movement.

By 1973, Kishio Suga, Lee Ufan, Nobuo Sekine, and other artists such as Susumu Koshimizu, Katsuro Yoshida, and Kōji Enokura, became collectively known as Mono-ha (literally “School of Things”).

Suga came to articulate his ideas in terms of hōchi, an act that highlights the reality of mono and their interdependence with the surrounding jōkyō (situation, context, or expanse). In his ongoing investigation of "situation" and the "activation of existence," Suga has produced many installations that are emblematic of the Mono-ha approach.

n addition to his site-specific installations, Suga also makes smaller assemblages that display on the wall or floor. Suga variously ties, binds, stacks, cuts, glues, paints, tapes, wedges, leans, peels, nails, screws, carves, bends, and folds these materials into their current forms.

Kishio Suga’s first solo exhibition was at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Tokyo, in 1968. His work has also been included in landmark surveys, such as the 8th Biennale de Paris in 1973; Japon des Avant Gardes 1910–1970, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1986; Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky, held at Yokohama Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994; and Reconsidering Mono-ha, National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2005.

His work has received renewed attention in the United States following his inclusion in Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, in February 2012. This exhibition was the first survey of Mono-ha in the United States.

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