A palpable sense of precarity pervades the sculptures of Japanese artist Aono Fumiaki. Hovering between construction and collapse, his archipelagic structures are assembled from cardboard, discarded furniture, bicycles, books, and other detritus bearing the diaristic, accidental, and intentional traces of previous use. Rather than treating these materials as neutral matter awaiting transformation, Fumiaki attends to the histories embedded within them. Scratches, stains, fractures, and alterations become felt information evidencing encounters that cannot be fully recovered, only reconsidered and regenerated. His sculptures thus occupy an unstable space between memory and material, where restoration is less an attempt to return to an original wholeness than a negotiation with what remains.
Fumiaki’s acts of mending preserve wounds as much as repair them, allowing ambiguity and contradiction to remain materially visible. As he says, he seeks “a sense of reality where everything, including the mysteries, ‘exists here and now’—a feeling of being truly present.” His sculptures consequently resist the fantasy that time can be reversed through repair. Instead, they register the contingencies of embodied spatial and temporal experience—how objects are handled, displaced, remembered, and transformed.
Mark Pieterson: Your biography notes that your interest in the act of restoration began after you witnessed a forest being destroyed in the 1990s. Why was this such a striking moment for you?
Aono Fumiaki: The forest that was logged was an important fieldwork site for my university graduation project. It was a place I loved, connected to the mountains and forests where I was born and raised in Sendai City. It was a metaphor for the human world, an “unknown territory” untouched by humankind. For me, it was a place that should never have been managed by human hands. One day, loggers suddenly arrived, cutting down trees with the loud sound of chainsaws. The cleared forest, once bright and bathed in sunlight, had been replaced by something else. It had become a space continuous with everyday human society.
MP: What similarities, if any, did this destructive act have with your visit to Miyako following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011? The trip to Miyako led to the creation of works like Repairing, Substitution, Consolidation, Incursion, Serial Arrangement, “Restoration of a car salvaged from East-Matsushima after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami” (2013).
AF: The damage to Miyako, my wife’s hometown, and the damage to the coastal area of Sendai during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake was equally shocking, but it was on the opposite vector from the destruction of the forest. It was not the destruction of nature, but destruction caused by nature. It was the destruction of human society by nature.
At first, I was very confused, but then I decided to preserve my favorite places, my precious memories, the towns and history of Tohoku, and to let the world and future generations know that such a way of life, landscapes, human kindness, and beauty existed. I realized that only I, born in this land, who creates art, who has long focused on the theme of “regeneration,” and who can continue my activities with minimal personal damage, could do this. I felt that I was born for this purpose.
I believe that the greatest restoration—creation—is born for the sake of what one loves. If something you love is destroyed, you have no choice but to regenerate it, no matter how difficult it may be. I think it’s this approach to engaging with objects and memories that highlights an interesting duality, which is never fully resolved in the artistic process: the simultaneous cohabitation of destructive and curative impulses that govern the encounter with salvaged objects.
The greater the destruction, the greater the regeneration. This is true whether it’s a “forest” or a “city.” Both are places I love. At the same time, the question arises: What do we perceive as destruction/regeneration? What do we see? Ultimately, isn’t this subjective, changing depending on the perspective?
MP: There is a certain order to your mending pedagogy. How does mending take on new ways of doing in different contexts?
AF: In the very early stages, from 1990 to 1995, restoration was considered and practiced within the “cycle” of creation/destruction. From 1996 onwards, the focus shifted to simply collecting broken and fallen objects and repeatedly restoring them. Restoration differs from so-called conventional “artistic creation” in that it can take many forms as an acquired involvement with the world—all kinds of maintenance, additions, alterations, and updates. Ultimately, the goal is to bring out and preserve the inherent characteristics that the found (encountered) fragments should possess. The focus is not on “things” as tools, but on the inherent characteristics, existence, and autonomy of the “things” themselves. The context—connected to a complex and multilayered spatio-temporal realm—is also considered.
Gradually, one comes to recognize that the restoration techniques change, or are compelled to change, depending on the condition of the found fragments. The essence is extracted by observing the “composition of the world” and used as the basis for creating the artwork. Initial restorations were simple, but various methods (substitution, fusion, accumulation, arrangement) are constantly being practiced simultaneously. Sometimes, encountering new fragments leads to new restoration methods and new names, increasing the variety each time.
MP: The kind of care registered by your reparative approach is particularly striking to me, especially your use of Amazon boxes in the “address” series. As a former Amazon worker in the Human Resources department, I have always associated those boxes with a cold, mechanical, and disheartening feeling. To see how you poetically enmesh this menial, yet contested, object with a sense of agency, play, and chromatic expressiveness is refreshing.
AF: I have worked with boxes prior to this series, but here they’ve taken on new meaning in a changing context. Since the pandemic, home delivery purchases have increased, and Amazon boxes have flooded my home, so in the process, they have been used more often in my work. I think the reason for their frequent use in the new works is that I made many prototypes using Amazon boxes, which are easy to work with and readily available. The design of Amazon boxes is neutral and simple, with minimal logos and markings. They also indicate that they are mass-produced products of society, separate from the context of art, making them an ideal medium and material for prototypes.
MP: I’m reminded of the works in Robert Rauschenberg’s “Cardbirds” series (1971), which were made using found cardboard. In an accompanying brochure, he wrote that, for him, using the material was a “desire built up…to work in a material of waste and softness. Something yielding with its only message a collection of lives imprinted like a friendly joke. A silent discussion of their history exposed by their new shapes.”
AF: If we read deeper into the meaning, since they are “containers” that hold circulating goods, they resonate with the image of “planets,” “where we live,” and “archipelagos.” These are the concepts I was working with in “Islands,” a recent exhibition with artist Rika Minamitani at Shinjuku’s AWASE Gallery.
MP: Despite the social valence, the sense of loss, and markedly personal response and responsibility indexed in much of your work, it is still very much about the objects—their relationship to the community and environment in which they are found and their formal role in acts of remembrance. How do you negotiate your desire to foreground the historicity and, as curator Ouchi Hikaru wrote, “the lost or vestigial pieces of memory” that objects hold without strictly favoring your own voice?
AF: The fragments—the material—transcend the artist’s intentions, human expectations, and societal values and meanings. On the other hand, there is a significant human element, a part moved and influenced by human expectations and personal memories. These fragments exist as a crystalline entity, intricately intertwined with diverse contexts. The work aims not to simplify them, but to preserve and highlight their diverse possibilities. I do not view the process as inhuman, indifferent, or impersonal.
One thing is certain: once something is broken, it can never be the same again. Time, the people involved, and the circumstances all change, and each time it is renewed anew. Repeating elements, shifting elements, and altered elements co-exist; I feel that “this world” is one that continues to live on, passed down while constantly changing. I think it would be wonderful if we could embody the composition of “this world,” connect with multiple contexts and spaces of time, and share a deeper and broader realm.
MP: You were commissioned to make a site-specific work for the Gwangju Theater as part of the International Visual Arts Exchange pavilion for the Gwangju Biennale. How have you responded to the conditions of the venue?
AF: The Gwangju Theater is an extremely challenging place. Various histories and meanings are layered and have been renewed for nearly 100 years, making it a work of art in itself. It’s a place overflowing with emotions—where the people of Gwangju have lived for so long, dreaming, enjoying themselves, crying, and contemplating. What could I do in such a place, using what I’ve done so far? I experimented and refined every day. As always, I began by finding intriguing “fragments” in this place, which would lead me somewhere. The fragments I picked up had to contain the history of Gwangju, its present state, the lives and realities of its people.
MP: You commented in an Instagram post that you were worried about a lot of things in the lead-up to the presentation.
AF: Naturally so. Several questions had come up for me, including what kind of relationship would emerge from these fragments, as well as the kind of relationship that they would create with the space, a place primarily for enjoying films. I hoped to draw out the multilayered charm of the Gwangju Theater and create a work that would shine even brighter. I am extremely interested in what will come from this experience.
People of the Gwangju Theater, 1935–2026, Aono Fumiaki’s new, site-specific work for the 16th Gwangju Biennale, is installed in the historic Gwangju Theatre through November 15, 2026.
