Partition of Realm 界の仕切り

Kishio Suga is an artist who represents the "Mono-ha", who presented pieces of wood, stone, metal, and glass without modifying them. In showing familiar objects "(mono)" in an unfamiliar setting, they attempted to divest them of conventionally attached images and to give them new life. In the case of Suga, the focus of his interest is on the nature of joints, borders, and boundaries where two different things meet. Where we sense a field ends, by the subtle change in the feel of air or whatever else, where we draw a line in our mind to set apart "here" and "there," in the fringes of a kind of magnetic field, it is at these places, the artist says, that we find objects. In this work too, which is a construction of untreated log pieces, the objects exist as partitions. The placement of object creates a field or a realm. What is notable with Suga's way of creating borders is that they are not enclosing or unbroken. The logs are broken into segments, never to form a complete shape. His works never fails, while presenting the concept of borders, to make the viewer see the objects also in their bare material existence.