Kishio Suga

As one of the leading members of the Mono-ha movement, Kishio Suga's artistic practice mainly focuses on exploring the relationships between objects (Mono) and space, as well as potential association that arise from combining the two.

Mono-ha was born in the late 60s and early 70s, in a tumultuous socio-political post-war climate that spawned many artists' movements in Japan and internationally, such as Arte Povera in Italy and Land Art in United States. Similar to the mainstream avant-garde art movements of the time, they discussed how to transcend Western Modernism.

 

Reeling from the horrors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mono-ha artists like Kishio Suga, Nobuo Sekine, Susumu Koshimizu, and Lee Ufan naturally rejected man-made forms, feeling that they led inevitably towards conflict and destruction. They shared a goal to accentuate what is intrinsically beautiful and artistic in raw materials by bringing together natural and industrial objects in their unaltered state, allowing dynamic combinations of materials to speak for themselves.

 

Suga explored into the notion of "surroundings" (shui) as an expansion of space in the 1980s. He attempted to demonstrate it visually by presenting divided space, with walls of connected objects. Executed in 1990 with Suga's mature techniques, Protrusion Series "Gaps in Surroundings" marks an important moment in his artistic oeuvre.

 

The work adopts a rectangular shape that deliberately mimics a pictorial plane, with various painted panels that serve as devices for setting up an active environment, in which the viewer then becomes part of the organic artistic process. There is no focal point in Suga's work, as the viewer is welcome to imagine through the installation with a liberated spirit.

 

Suga firmly believes that people and things exist in a relationship of mutual dependence (izon). His work creates another environment where active minds and the physicality of the reality come into a unity. Furthermore, when the reality of things and human perception find a fine equilibrium, it is when the essence of this shared "situation" between the two is revealed.

Protrusion Series "Gaps in Surroundings" (1990) is a masterpiece that seamlessly illustrates Suga's passionate pursuit of the perception of things. Standing in front of the work, one is not only looking, but also invited to gaze through it, transforming the surrounding space through his/her own imagination and arrangements, and often associating it with landscapes commonly developed in Suga's oeuvre.

 

Such practice embodies an antithesis of late capitalism in the postmodern world, calling for enlightenment of the artistic subject and the fluidity of the phenomenological world (Tetsuya Kamimura, Tomio Koyama, Mikio Okado, and Tsuyoshi Satoh, "Kishio Suga and Mono-ha – In Place of an Introduction," in Kishio Suga "Intentional Scenic Space," Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, 2017, p. 93). Therefore, Suga works beyond the identity of an artist – he is made a poet and a philosopher, in the moment of the viewer's self-realization of the essence of existentialism.