Kishio Suga

(born 1944), is a Japanese sculptor and installation artist currently living in Itō, Shizuoka, Japan.

He is one of the key members of Mono-ha, a group of artists who became prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Mono-ha artists explored the encounter between natural and industrial materials, such as stone, steel plates, glass, light bulbs, cotton, sponge, paper, wood, wire, rope, leather, oil, and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. The works focus as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves.

Career

Kishio Suga was born in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture. From 1964 to 1968, he was a student in the painting department at Tama Art University in Tokyo. While at Tama, Suga read the writings of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Kitarō Nishida, Kei Nishitani, Nāgārjuna, and Vasubandhu.

During this period, two artists who taught at the university were important influences on Suga. Yoshishige Saitō encouraged Suga and other students to take a deconstructive approach to modernism and Euro-American-centric art theory. Another influential teacher was the artist Jiro Takamatsu, whose illusionistic paintings and sculpture were central to the development of the Tokyo art scene at that time. Suga's early work reflected this approach. In his first solo exhibition, at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Tokyo, in November 1968, Suga presented Space Transformation (1968) (転移空間), a freestanding structure of red-painted wood that gave the illusion of a stack of boxes collapsing under their own weight.

At the same time as Suga was producing these illusionistic paintings and sculptures, he was already shifting to an engagement with raw materials in works such as Layered Space (1968) (積層空間), a transparent acrylic box containing layers of sawdust, cotton, ashes, plastic dust, and soil.

By 1973, Kishio Suga, Lee Ufan, Nobuo Sekine, and other artists such as Susumu Koshimizu, Katsuro Yoshida, and Kōji Enokura, became collectively known as Mono-ha (literally “School of Things”).

Suga came to articulate his ideas in terms of hōchi (放置, release), an act that highlights the reality of mono (もの, things) and their interdependence with the surrounding jōkyō (状況, situation, context, or expanse). In his ongoing investigation of "situation" and the "activation (アクティベーション) of existence," Suga has produced many installations that are emblematic of the Mono-ha approach. Suga's work was also featured in Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant Garde at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2012. In 2016, Suga was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation to resurrect one of his site-responsive works from the 1970s at Dia:Chelsea.

In 2024, he was part of the collective exhibition called Without Stars 2, which was installed at the Experimental Exhibition room located in the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas (Venezuela), where an exhibition copy authorized and supervised by Blum Gallery Law of Multitude was shown together with artworks by Gary Kuehn, Meyer Vaisman, Annette Lemieux, Eduardo Azuaje and Mario Pérez who also curated the event.

Collections

Kishio Suga's work is in the collection of numerous museums, including:

Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba Dallas Museum of Art, Texas Glenstone Foundation, Potomac, Maryland Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo National Museum of Art, Osaka National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Tate Modern, London Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo Yokohama Museum of Art, Kanagawa Dia Art Foundation, New York

Awards

Kishio Suga was awarded the 11th Shell Art Prize in 1967, the Grand Prize at the 5th Japan Art Festival in 1970, and Mainichi Awards in 2016. He teaches at Tama Art University, Tokyo.