Yuting (Roxy) TANG

The He Art Museum (HEM) presents Kishio Suga’s large-scale solo exhibition “Spatial Objects” in a landmark venue designed and built by the famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The works on display span more than half a century, and show the rational and realistic spiritual temperament of modernity in terms of scale and perception.

Kishio Suga’s artistic practice often places “objects” in different “presence” contexts, thereby re-anchoring the aesthetic discussion about “objects”. As one of the key figures of the famous “Mono-ha” in the 1960s and 1970s, Kishio Suga, with his understanding and evolution of Heidegger’s “existence is not existents” and the “there are things and rules” in Eastern philosophy such as Laozi and Zhuangzi, coupled with the global rapid development of capitalization and industrialization at that time, forged a series of site-specific installation masterpieces with considerable reconstruction significance.

At the beginning of this spring, the He Art Museum presented Suga Kishio’s large solo exhibition “Corresponding Space” in its landmark venue designed and built by the famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The works on display this time span more than half a century, and the number is more than 70 groups. The integrated architectural space and the volume of the works first show the rational and realistic spirit of modernity from its scale and perception.

The large and bright He Art Museum presents several classic works of the artist on the wall and the ground in a staggered manner on the first floor. The audience who enters the exhibition hall are immediately attracted by the wood blocks, iron nets, stone columns and transparent films, and fall to the edge of meaning unconsciously in amazement and confusion. The work “Space” created in 1996 is a large installation covering an area of ​​27 square meters, which is the size of an ordinary room, but it is composed of only two obvious simple materials: groups of vertical plywood of various colors and iron grids that are pure and almost like two-dimensional lines. At the other end of the space, the mottled concrete pillars were cut to support a circle of regular L-shaped wooden boards, forming a “Stonehenge” that resembles a practical type. In this way, the thin film “screen” between the two large installations also becomes reasonable due to its “functional orientation”, but the scattered “parts” inexplicably appear “redundant”.

“There are many inexplicable things and phenomena in the space we live in. In a sense, my work is salvaging these uncertain elements and vague existences.” Suga Kishio once said. The metaphor of the exhibition title is displayed in succession in the subsequent floors. For example, in the equally ordinary but poetic “PROTRUSION” series, the ups and downs of the form of points, lines and surfaces are like some ultimate revelation, homogenizing and diffusing all the “meaning” clues of materials, shapes and colors that can be seen; almost at the same time, the artist has given these “objects” a new interpretation of existence.

After the rationality of the philosophical interface gave rise to right and wrong, rules and standards, although Hegel and Weber had successively disenchanted the dualistic Taoism, human nature always seemed to wander within and outside the boundaries of empiricism. The repeated establishment of structure is also reflected in Suga Kishio’s understanding and use of creative materials: wood, soil, stone (fire), metal and knots (water). The high temperature of the underground in ancient times quenched stones, and the soil and water wrapped each other to give birth to grass. Human craftsmanship wove rattan into knots, and used raw materials such as stone and soil to build houses, roads, and the world of “things” on which we depend for survival. So far, Suga Kishio has used material elements to eliminate the superficial illusion of human society, and directly questioned the root kinetic energy between the essence of the individual and the interaction forces in the associated field.