In Conversation With Hiraku Suzuki, New Exhibition at Daiwa Japan House Gallery

 

The elegant Georgian rooms that make up the Daiwa Foundation Japan House Gallery have been transformed by Berlin-based Japanese artist, Hiraku Suzuki. Mystical swirls of hieroglyphic text, shimmering silver silhouettes and tomb-shaped graphite rubbings create an unworldly, primeval atmosphere for the new exhibition, Excavated Reverberations. The symbols that are a reoccurring motif in these works are all indecipherable. So, Suzuki-san, what does it all mean?

Suzuki first introduced me to the graphite rubbings. When he was at Chelsea College in 2011, he started to make tablet-shaped aluminium sculptures. He used the process of sand-casting, the simplest form of casting, which in itself harks back to times past. The strange marks on the sculptures look as if they were taken from an ancient forgotten script. What was it that inspired Suzuki to create these shapes? Actually, they are tracing of patterns that he found in the light- some are from under a poplar tree, or the shapes that he saw on his desk, coming through his blinds. The shadows cast by sunlight only exist for fleeting moments as the sun’s position shifts or the tree branches move- the artist has captured something ephemeral and cast it in aluminium. First in the drawing and then in the casting process, and next in the frottages, the original shape has been taken from positive to negative and back again- a theme which is reoccurring in this exhibition.

Suzuki draws these, ‘glyphs of light’ as he terms them, partly as an investigation into the genesis of writing and symbols – he meditates on what may have inspired primitive peoples to begin  to make marks,  by enacting  simple playful gestures like tracing shadows.  The method he uses is also primitive, instead of capturing the shapes of the light by using a camera; he draws the shapes onto paper. For Suzuki drawing and mark-making are fundamental human and primitive modes of expression, which he gives a contemporary twist.

The genesis of writing systems and lettering is a theme which is more explicitly explored in the two large pencil and silver pen drawings entitled circuit (2012/2013) which consist of spirals of what seem to be letters or symbols. These forms take influence from the shapes found in Japanese Katakana, Korean Hangeul lettering and there are echoes of Arabic scripts, but are all purely a creation of the artist. These shapes are referencing the creation of writing systems as the artist generates his own language; he is trying to ‘excavate’ the process of creating symbols or lettering. I suggest to him that perhaps also these drawings could also be a reference to a future language, a writing system which combines aspects of many scripts from around the world.

The circular movement of the circuit drawings also echo the grooves on a record or the rings in a tree and the drawings record the time that Suzuki has spent on the picture and this time period then reverberates into the present, the time that the viewer spends observing the drawing.  These spirals start out incredibly tiny imperceptible marking and get larger and more fractured.

The swirling patterns move in the opposite direction in the picture on the right than the one on the left creating almost a mirror image; again the artist plays with the idea of reflection and opposition, positive and negative imagery.

The theme of excavating, an artistic archaeology as it were, is one that runs through all the work in this exhibition. The artist grew up in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan near Jomon sites of archaeological interest and, as a boy, he would often dig and come across shards of pottery and other objects. Jomon figures and artefacts make an appearance in the last group of works which are called castings. They are pages of old exhibition and auction catalogues featuring art, antiques and ancient objects which the artist has painstakingly collected from second-hand book shops.  I could just about make out shapes of Jomon Dogu – and other ancient looking artefacts – amongst other comparatively ‘newer’ objects. The artist has cut a stencil around each object then obliterated it with silver spray paint, so only a negative shape and the shadow of the object remain. The artist has also made subtle changes to the form of the object, to further complicate the process. He likens this process of stencilling to the process of casting as the name suggests- he has cast these objects in silver and pared them down to a simple form that puzzle and challenge the viewer to try and work out what they may have been. There are artefacts from all over the world, not just Japanese ones, and they are collected together, losing the trace of their original location and value; arranged and reformed in a curatorial process that Suzuki likens to composing music.

The silver colour, so much a part of Suzuki’s work, is most evident in the casting series. ‘Why silver?’ I ask the artist. Surely you could equally blot out the objects in black, or write in ink? He explains that because silver reflects light, his drawings seem to move, dance as we progress through the exhibition space, so inviting element of participation from the viewer whilst creating a resonance with the light and the ambience of the room.  Suzuki wants his work to have a certain resonance with the exhibition space and with the viewer. This concept, that dormant ideas and memories are awoken and resonate through the artist, between the works and the viewer, is key to Suzuki’s artwork.