The second approach is to repeat a single material that causes an enhanced, almost meditative focus on matter itself, thus challenging how we view the interaction between matter and external forces. exist Parallel formations (1969), for example, Suga stacks paraffin waxes in columnar formation. As curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi pointed out, the only real artistic intervention is the choice to use this material and repeat it until it produces a fortress-like architectural structure. The results violate expectations: wax, often associated with softness, forging and transientity, is a monolithic presence with structural, confident and lasting presence here.
Similar logical drives Soft concrete (1970), Suga removes our assumptions about robustness. The purpose is subverted by the use of typical elements of reinforced concrete (steel and cement). The oil-filled concrete remains soft and sticky, and is hardly contained by a rigid steel frame. The work exposes the futility of pushing matter into a fixed form, causing entropy to overflow and refusing to close. In both works, the material becomes a site of philosophical resistance, sticking to its own actions and scheming towards the scope of human beings trying to shape, frame, or contain the physical world.
“Suga does not treat sculpture as an autonomous object, but is an incongruous, sometimes absurd, sculpture situation that explores the unstable order of things,” Guidelli-Guidi said. A particularly striking example is Study in the wild (1974), a three-part device in which straw ropes are stretched, sliced and tied into precisely arranged bales. This work is a dynamic phase of testing relationships, unfolding in a continuous, periodic exchange of exchanges between sculpture and body, matter and energy. This manifestation of the interrelationship of our space in the world is embedded in the process of production and installation.
In this sense, Suga’s inquiry is similar to those of Robert Morris and other artists related to process art. For Suga, however, the process itself is by no means the end, but invites observational materials with radical attention, freeing from assumptions and associations that are often associated with architecture, monumentality or sculpture’s permanence.
In the 1970s, Suga also worked in construction, and many of the materials he used in his art came directly from these locations: stone, heavy wood, corrugated precast concrete slabs. Through this lens, and realizing the socio-political background of post-war Japan, Suga’s works reveal the undercurrent of political consciousness. His sculptural arrangements became a reason to control everyday life, uncover and uneasy to curb the structure of infrastructure that strengthened power dynamics and social hierarchies within cities and communities. In this sense, his seemingly abstract installations make subtle and keen comments on the role of architecture in shaping our interactions with material and social reality.
To this end, we can also understand how Suga’s work raises questions not only about perception but also about people and social agents themselves. For Suga, form is not an embodiment of the artist’s will, but a result of conditions. This is a key difference compared to the concept of site-specificity or field responses accepted by many American artists of his generation: Suga’s works are often created based on space, and then left out from there, abandoned, which is abandoned by the effects of the phenomenon around them. In this gesture, a quiet but sharp criticism of the human-centered worldview reveals how human beings and actions are always part of the wider entanglement of power and entity, but to adhere to the universal logic beyond any fantasy under control or mastery HOMO FABER.
In this regard, we can also detect the echo between Suga’s work and the combined theory of Deleuze and Guattari, which fundamentally rethinks how things (body, object, object, thought, institution) form dynamic, temporary constellations. Suga’s combination embraces the authoritativeness of forms that undermine any stable concept of identity, welcomes human and non-human, organic and synthetic, survival and inertia, physics and discourse heterogeneity. His sculptural situation provides a more precise image of reality, such as process, instability and openness.
In this dimension of co-creation with matter, even in Jane Bennett Vibrant things: the political ecology of things (2010), a basic text of post-humanistic materialist thought. In Suga’s practice and Bennett’s writings, the non-human world is not only symbolic or instrumental, but also a collaborator of meaning creation, an agent in an interdependent field that requires another kind of political and ecological adjustment. As Bennett wrote, “The moral task here is to develop the ability to recognize non-human vitality and be perceived open.”
All summer, “Kishio Suga” will be at Dia Beacon. Suga’s Murder Magazine Movie, Existence and murder (1999), and his performative “activated” video document will be screened for the first time outside of Dia Chelsea, Japan until August 9, 2025.
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