Moon in Vassiviére ヴァシヴィエールの月

"What began as a faint metallic 'chink', suddenly turned to a shriek of fear, that slit the deep woods'calm. A few days passed.... another forest was gone" (Kimio Tsuchiya, "Locus", Tokyo, 1992, p.9). In 1990, Tsuchiya stepped into the forest in Vassiviére, a town near Limoges, France, for the occasion of his one-man show at the Centre d'Art Contemporain de Vassiviére. He found and picked up some pieces of wood left indifferently behind after the timbers were cut. The pieces, which used to be blessed with a life as a large leafy tree, were placed by him in a half-circle, and they began to dance the dance of death and life against the dark sky. The form of waxing and waning phases of the moon, suggests our hope that these pieces of wood will decompose, become part of the earth, and rise again as a tree, growing tall into the sky and spreading leafy branches. In the 1980s, Tsuchiya took cut-down trees or wooden scraps from the factories and assembled them in huge half-circles or spirals as if turned them into breathing masses. Then, after the group of works to which this "Moon in Vassiviére" belongs, he began to produce works made of ash from abandoned wooden houses. From huge structures to ash, that is the final form as well as the initial form for any existence. Tsuchiya is offering an eternal prayer for the endless cycle of life.