The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is pleased to announce a new exhibition of the works by Kishio Suga. This is his 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.

Events programme

Private View
16 October 2008, 6.00-8.00pm

Kishio Suga in conversation with Simon Groom (Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Scotland)
17 October 2008, 6.00-8.00pm

Special weekend opening
18-19 October 2008, 11.00am-6.00pm

Late night opening
21 October 2008, until 8.00pm

Japanese Contemporary Art with Kiyoko Mitsuyama-Wdowiak (freelance lecturer and researcher)
An illustrated talk on post-war Japanese art featuring three leading artists - Isamu Noguchi, Kishio Suga and Yoshitomo Nara - whose works are exhibited in the UK this autumn, followed by gallery talk on Kishio Suga.
(Isamu Noguchi - Yorkshire Sculpture Park, until 22 February 2009; Yoshitomo Nara + GRAF - BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, until 26 October 2008. Both exhibitions are supported by the Foundation.)
30 October 2008, 6.00-8.00pm
Booking essential

Late night opening
4 November 2008, until 8.00pm

Biography

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 opens in August 2008 in Itamuro, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan.

'Kishio Suga' is organised by The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in association with the Tomio Koyama Gallery to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair and Asian Art Week in London. It is a Japan-UK 150 event.

Other works by Kishio Suga will be displayed at the Tomio Koyama Gallery and the Sculpture Park at the Frieze Art Fair (16-19 October 2008) in Regent's Park, opposite the Foundation.


*Mono-ha (school of things) is the name given to a group of artists who came to critical attention in Japan in the late 1960s. These ‘things' refer not only to the natural material things from which their work is made, but also to the strangeness of the works themselves. Neither quite sculptures, nor installations, their very existence appears to confound traditional artistic genres. Thus Mono-ha has been called Japan’s first avant-garde art movement. Although never formally a group, leading artists of Mono-ha include Kishio Suga, Lee Ufan and Nobuo Sekine.
(from 'Mono-ha – school of things', Kettle’s Yard exhibition catalogue)