ART CITIES: N.York-Tetsuya Yamada

Tetsuya Yamada’s body of work experiments with qualities of twinkling and balanced lightness and weighty, assured heaviness. Polished glaze casts glimmers across the sunny space and enticing forms suspended from the ceiling cast long shadows across the exhibition space.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Walker Art Center Archive

Tetsuya Yamada’s solo exhibition “Listening” encompasses more than 20 years of work, foregrounding his commitment to what he refers to as “the truth of material” a concept that guides his interdisciplinary practice. Listening is the first comprehensive US museum exhibition to survey the artist’s expansive practice, featuring a range of more than 65 new and previous works. Trained in ceramics the artist has expanded into a broad range of media including sculpture, video, drawing, painting, and installation. Yamada has designed the gallery environment at the Walker as a garden path along which one can explore the range of materials and influences. Some works are made from ordinary, human items (bits of machinery, sawhorses, newspaper, plywood) or forms found in nature (branches, rocks, sand, living plants). The artist places these materials in dialogue with his hand-built and thrown ceramic objects, delicate drawings, video works, and paintings drawn from mathematical systems. As the artist says: “Sometimes the behavior of materials, objects, space, and light becomes a metaphor or a voice speaking to me. The idea of Listening is well adapted to the creative process-listening to the process. The process might take me to places I didn’t imagine initially-this is the fundamental of studio practice for me”. Exploring the shifting boundaries between art and life, Yamada draws inspiration from the ancient Japanese forms of Noh theater and the traditional tea ceremony; the modernism of Constantin Brancusi and lsamu Noguchi; the democracy to the found object espoused by Marcel Duchamp; and the commitment to the use of simple, elemental materials seen in the work of the artists of the Japanese Mono-ha and Italian Arte Povera movements of the 1960s. Within this is a sensibility that considers the urban environment as backdrop-the artist spent his youth as a skateboarder exploring the streets of Tokyo, listening to punk rock, and thinking about the landscape of the city as a site for artistic expression. Works in the exhibition show Yamada’s consideration of ordinary objects or daily rituals as building blocks for larger expressions. His monumental sculpture “Everyday City” (2005), a work in the Walker’s collection, gathers over 800 hand-thrown stoneware plates, cups, bowls, and other objects to form an imagined urban skyline. “9435E3628094”, a video work from 2016, is named for the Twin Cities highways traveled in a circular route around the artist’s studio.

Photo: Tetsuya Yamada, Listening, Installation view,Courtesy the artist and Walker Art Center

Info: Curators: Siri Engberg and Laurel Rand-Lewis, Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN, USA, Duration: 18/1-7/7/2024, , Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-21:00,  https://walkerart.org/