Kishio Suga

Johyun Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Kishio Suga, a seminal figure in Japan’s Mono-ha(もの派) movement. From December 14, 2023 to February 18, 2024, Johyun Gallery will showcase the artist’s oeuvre across five decades from 1975 to 2023, encompassing the artist’s ontological explorations of objects and their perceived-ness. The exhibition, which includes his unique flat object works and site-specific installations reinterpreting the exhibition space, will be a landscape of dynamic encounters transcending traditional artistic genres of painting and sculpture.

Johyun Gallery Dalmaji, Installation view, 2023, Courtesy of Johyun Gallery

The site-specific installation on the ground floor of Johyun Gallery interacts with the exhibition space itself. The gallery was expanded in 2021, and with it, a flagstone staircase was installed, drawing visitors up to the exhibition spaces. The polymorphic shape of the exhibition floorspace is transparently bordered on one side with a glass vantage, the quartered ovoid glass wall shaded from the sun like a crag. From the exhibition floor, the park forest overlaps with the sea, combining art with the surrounding environment.

Johyun Gallery Dalmaji, Installation view, 2023, Courtesy of Johyun Gallery

There, the installation consisting of 550 cobbles collected from Busan’s rivers and streams, connected by 500 pieces of uniformly cut conductive copper wire are arranged on the floor to interlink stone to stone to wire, artwork to exhibition space to the outside world. The stones rounded and smoothed over millennia of metamorphic cycles situated indoors remain as-is, as-are, but weighed by meaning unlike stones immediately outside in the park, making conscious to spectators the essence of matter within the context and structure of relationships.

Johyun Gallery Dalmaji, Installation view, 2023, Courtesy of Johyun Gallery

Kishio Suga moves beyond viewing objects as matters of representation and deals with their ontology of presence, positioning unprocessed objects of wood, metal, stone, paper, rope, concrete, wax, and plastic within the exhibition space. His intervention in that space is artistic and facilitatory to the palpable yet veiled relationships between objects, space, and people. His works allow the free-roaming of their unadulterated essences, revealing their presence through relationships. On this, the artist comments, “It is not about finitizing something for definitions, but understanding where the boundaries lie and adopting the situation where their most natural form of existence is revealed.”

Johyun Gallery Dalmaji, Installation view, 2023, Courtesy of Johyun Gallery

The works installed on the second floor reveal the multi-structured space within objects. Although they appear to emphasize canvas-like object structures as imitations of painterly compositions, artist is in fact exploring the practical existence of objects in the three-dimensionality of thickness, length, height, width, and so on. This continuity of object to object, foreground to background, existence to non-existence, creates a landscape of infinite relational possibilities. And what connects and brings this rhythmic landscape into order is interdependence. Just as objects in nature exist in a continuum of interdependence, the meeting of natural and artificial objects represents the totality of structure-dependent chaos and chaos-dependent structure.

Johyun Gallery Dalmaji, Installation view, 2023, Courtesy of Johyun Gallery

Mono-ha (lit. “School of Things”) was a group of like-minded artists working in Tokyo in the late 60s and early 70s who presented natural materials (もの) freed of utility,alongside man-made objects in careful groupings that emphasized material properties, surrounding space, and active physical forces. The artists did not alter their materials, but rather arranged them in new phenomenological states, inviting viewers to encounter the work in an active, ever-unfolding present. This approach focused on situations where the essence of objects was revealed rather than presented as created artworks, can be seen as a movement that arose in response to the turbulent cultural and political context of Japan at the time, as resistance to traditional education systems, and also the artists’ reaction to minimalism happening in the West.

Johyun Gallery Dalmaji, Installation view, 2023, Courtesy of Johyun Gallery

Kishio Suga attended Tama Art University in Tokyo from 1964 to 1968. There he and other young artists like Nobuo Sekine and Jiro Takamatsufound a like mind in each other and in the influence ofinternational trends such as Arte Povera and Land Art, giving rise to Mono-ha.Soon after his graduation, he began making ephemeral arrangements of natural and manmade materials in outdoor locations around Tokyo, a practice he later termed “fieldwork.” His arrangements and activities were also translated into indoor environments, quickly gaining recognition for installations such as Parallel Strata(1969), a totemic enclosure made of paraffin wax, and Soft Concrete(1970), four vertical steel plates arranged into a square and shored up with a mound of oil-infused concrete.

Kishio Suga has exhibited at the 8th Paris Biennale and the 38th and 57th Venice Biennales, and his past four decades of practice has been featured in landmark exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Punta della Dogana, Venice.He most recently exhibited at Dia: Chelsea, New York, and Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan.The artist’s works are included in many public and private collections.

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