ART CITIES:N.York-Kishio Suga
Kishio Suga was among the prime movers of Mono-ha, an artistic group born in the late 1960s. He began showing his work at a time of great cultural ferment in Japan and international experimentation. In 1978, Suga was chosen to represent his Country at the Venice Biennale, introducing the West to an artistic language in which the investigation of materials and space is rooted in a deep affinity to nature and the environment.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive
Kishio Suga in his solo exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery in New York presents large-scale, wall-mounted assemblages. In tandem with the iconic site-specific installations Kishio Suga has made since the late 1960s, Suga has constructed assemblages throughout his career. . In these works, the artist brings wood, branches, metal, rope, wire, and various other materials into incongruous arrangements in order to reveal the reality of mono and the jōkyō that binds them. In his “situations”, a term Suga adopted to describe his installations for its implied mutability, the artist highlights both the internal qualities of a given substance (such as mass, structure, and weight) and the external forces acting on it (such as gravity, humidity, and time). As he further explains, “extracting the reality of a physical object is about making tangible its invisible aspects”. In his recent large-scale assemblages, Suga continues to explore the act of establishing boundaries only to disrupt them. “Scene of Elapsed Cause” (2017) consists of a red rectangle painted on a white ground, its form interrupted by a horizontal plank. While the red field extends over the middle of the plank, the unpainted ends protrude beyond the white perimeter. Similar acts of displacement occur throughout the body of work on view: in “Elements of Elapsing Cause” (2017), a blue backboard is traversed by five horizontal bars of unpainted wood, each of which has been sliced into cubes that deviate upwards and downwards in staggered waves. In “Latent Laterals-Cause of Marginal Parameters” (2017), a black rectangle painted on a wood panel is split into two and partially migrated from the lower left to the top right corner of the work’s outer frame. The titles of Suga’s artworks are translations of Japanese neologisms that he formulates, sometimes prior to creation of the work, sometimes after. These agglomerations of kanji characters evoke a wide variety of nuances, many of them relating to the interdependence among individual entities and the whole: “Marginal Occurrence” (2016), “Oriented Void” (2017), “Latent Accumulation” (2017), and “Rows of Connected Equivalence” (2015). The discrepancies between material, perception, and language have been a constant theme in Suga’s writing since the 1960s.
Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 19 East 66 Street, New York, Duration: 1/3-14/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com
