Kishio Suga

This was Kishio Suga’s first solo show in the UK.

Suga is one of the leading artists of ‘Mono-ha’ (school of things), a movement that swept the Japanese art world from the end of the 1960s through the 1970s. After studying with Giju Saito at Tama Art University, Tokyo, Suga began using various methods to combine wood, stone, metal fragments and glass sheets, and deployed these combinations in exhibition spaces.

We can perceive a piece of wood on many levels – from its surface to its cross section, from the whole to only a part, from its silhouette to its cellular makeup. In some sense, the wood doesn’t even exist until we perceive it. In a single stone pulses the logic of countless stones. A cosmos dwells within every piece of matter.

Suga draws out these hidden currents and unites them, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict, and opens up a light, free-flowing channel within the space. With a consistent focus on our surroundings, Suga brushes aside our search for symbolic meaning in the things we see and conjures up new, unfamiliar relationships between things. Via the paraphernalia of everyday, he raises the curtain on a new world, and in liberating us from usual habits of thought, gives us a fresh set of eyes.

Kishio Suga was born in 1944 in Morioka city, Japan. He graduated in painting from Tama Art University in 1968. For forty years, since his first solo show in 1968 to the present, Suga has participated in numerous exhibitions. Large-scale solo exhibitions among these have been Uncertain Void: Installation by Suga Kishio at Iwate Museum of Art (2005), Kishio Suga: Stance at Yokohama Museum of Art (1999), and a touring exhibition, Kishio Suga Exhibition, at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; Itami City Museum of Art; Kanagawa Prefecture Gallery and Chiba City Museum of Art (1997). He has also been active internationally, participating in Mono-ha – school of things at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and Newlyn Art Gallery (both 2001), a touring exhibition Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky at Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; Guggenheim Museum New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (1994), Japon de Avant Gardes 1910-1970 at Le Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1986), and showing at The 38th Venice Biennale (1978), among many other exhibitions. Suga’s works will be part of the permanent collection of the Soko Gallery, which opened in August 2008 in Itamuro, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan.