Extensions of the Ordinary

Art in America, April, 2000 by Janet Koplos

In the 30 years since he emerged as one of the leaders of Japan's Mono-ha movement, Kishio Suga has worked in an enormous variety of forms and materials to express a simple--and profound--sense of universal connectedness.

The sculptor Kishio Suga was one of the prime figures in the "Mono-ha" movement, a late-'60s/early-'70s phenomenon in Japanese art. "Mono-ha" (usually translated as the School of Things, which was originally a mocking term) can be related, in its formal austerity, to Minimalism, but is closer to Arte Povera in ascribing a creative and existential power to substances themselves, natural, industrial or synthetic. Works were commonly made of unaltered materials temporarily brought together in some configuration of interdependence. Often the object or installation was not meant to be purchased and preserved but existed as a concept that could be realized anew at any time.

Suga, now 56, has been described as the purest adherent to these principles, which were generally expressed in sculptural form. He believes that transcendence is possible only as an extension from the concrete and mundane; it is impossible in the imaginary world of painted illusion.[1] He has said that the basic philosophy of his work is "expanding outward." That's an interesting phrase, an open, almost poetic fragment that seems itself to expand outward as one thinks about it.

His clearest statement of "expanding outward" was probably his 1970 Infinity Condition. It consisted of several pieces of 4-by-4 lumber propping open the double-hung windows of a Kyoto museum. The wall label for the work cited as its materials "square wood beams, structure of building, outdoor scenery." Another quintessential expression of the encompassing idea was An Aspect in a Whole, Suga's major installation in the Japanese pavilion at the 1978 Venice Biennale, which consisted of 20 cedar logs, split lengthwise, with half of each log standing and the other half flat on the floor. Relationships were multiplied here, starting with each half seeming to yearn for its other, and then pointing beyond the sculpture itself: the verticals related to the structure of the pavilion, to the trees in the Biennale garden, etc.; the horizontals paralleled the floor on which they lay and the ground outside, and so on--to the ends of the earth, presumably.

Regularly featured in Japanese museums and galleries, Suga's work was presented in a 1997-98 retrospective exhibition that completed its four-stop tour at the Chiba City Museum of Art; since then he has had another major show (12 new works and a video) at the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as two Tokyo gallery shows this past summer and fall. All the works in the traveling exhibition showed his typical use of ordinary materials, carefully placed. For example, plywood wall pieces involve gouging the wood and then repairing the injury with plaster, the color and texture of which calls attention to the interaction of these banal substances. Another type of work consists of a rough rectangular frame of wood or stone, parallel to the floor and outlining an empty space; these stand on legs that are irregular in shape and size and are often supplemented with another cooperatively functioning material. The show was a generous sampling of the multitude of possibilities that Suga has suggested over 30 years, including protrusions, displacements, linkages, entanglements, frames, barriers, enclosures, braces and props, to name a few--a catalogue of nouns reminiscent of Richard Serra's list of verbs.[2]

The variety in the makeup of these works emphasizes the deliberate yet unostentatious intentionality of Suga's constructions, which reflect the thought and effort of human endeavors; despite their "naturalness," none of the sculptures could have just happened. At the same time, this variety explicitly announces the provisionality of everything: we see that wood can be chopped or milled and can decay; stone can be cut or broken or eroded; the work can be like or unlike the space that is its context; purpose can be forgotten; names are imprecise; the maker himself is ephemeral. In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, Suga writes, "[W]hat I want to achieve is actually a state of complex and multi-layered existence or what might be called a deepening of conception about ... existence."[3]

Suga's sculptures prompt philosophical musings, yet they are anything but theoretical. Their physical qualities and casual spatial sense make them accessible. The biggest installations add to their material immediacy the power of repetition. They are made of simple elements, but they can become accumulatively complex almost beyond quantifying. The 1997 installation Syuiritsu (Law of Surrounding Position) was a rectangular field of regularly spaced metal poles about 10 feet tall, rising abruptly from the gallery's gray carpeting. At their tops, these vertical elements were joined to horizontal ones by means of brass couplings. Scattered on the floor were dozens of water-smoothed boulders, each with a hole drilled in it and a white rope emerging and running across space to tie onto one of the top poles.