For six decades, Kishio Suga has explored the question of whether intentions adhere to things. One of Japan’s most important artists and a key figure in the Mono-ha movement, he began his career in the late 1960s, using natural and industrial materials to create temporary installations that aimed to show “the reality of mono (things/materials) and the jōkyō (situation) that holds them together.” Suga’s sculptures, site-specific installations, assemblages, and performances consider not only the inherent qualities of materials such as wood, stone, metal, wax, and concrete, but also their unexpected connections and what those might reveal about relations between objects, space, and human perception within the surrounding environment.
Robert Preece: Law of Situation (1971/2017), installed at the Gaggiandre dockyards behind the Arsenale at the 2017 Venice Biennale, was a stunning re-interpretation of an earlier work involving stones, wood, and plastic in water. Were you able to select the site in Venice? What ideas lie behind the work?
Kishio Suga: I first made Law of Situation for the Fourth Modern Japanese Sculpture Exhibition at the Ube City Open-Air Museum in Japan in 1971. I pushed a 20-meter-long fiberglass board out onto
a lake and placed a row of stones on it, so the board was barely visible under the surface of the water, which reflected the sky. . .
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