Kishio Suga

Kishio Suga brings together a representative group of the artist’s sculptures, dating from the 1960s to the ’90s, that probe the slippages between seeing and knowing. Works culled from Dia’s holdings are complemented by key loans, together unsettling habitual expectations of materials’ behaviors, including concrete, machine oil, paraffin wax, metal, and stone that are set in serial, mutually upholding, and at times precarious arrangements. Inflected anew by the conditions of the site in which they are displayed, each of Suga’s sculptures stages a carefully framed incoherence.

In conjunction with the exhibition’s opening, Suga’s murder-mystery film, Being and Murder (1999), and video documentation of his performative “activations” will screen for the first time outside of Japan at Dia Chelsea, from July 9 to August 9.

Kishio Suga is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head, with Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.

Since the late 1960s, Kishio Suga’s practice has been motivated by a philosophical inquiry into the very fabric of reality and whether art can expand our perception of things (in Japanese “mono”) beyond preconceived notions imposed by use and language. To this end, rather than conceiving sculptures as autonomous objects, the artist began placing unaltered materials in serial, mutually upholding, and at times precarious arrangements, unsettling expectations of these materials’ behavior and negating their conventional representations, definitions, and utilities. Pointing to his works’ essential contingency, Suga refers to them as “situations”; in his words, “A situation is rooted in the breakdown of the already present system. . . . It excludes all traits that can be imitated or duplicated.”

To expose the nature of things beyond received concepts, Suga either sets several materials in relation to each other or deploys the same one over and over again. Diagonal Phase (1969/2012) and Parallel Strata (1969/2025) are early examples of this experimental method, through which the “existence” of a thing can surface. In Diagonal Phase, two pieces of construction wood rest against each other, appearing to be held in place by small stones at their base. The resulting configuration is one among many positions that the components can take in relation to each other and their surroundings (for instance, the wood might rest flat on the ground). While in Diagonal Phase Suga experiments with the interdependency of wood, stone, and their locality, in Parallel Strata he employs a single material repeatedly: Paraffin wax is layered into a fortlike structure, undoing the usual assumption of the material’s physicality. “We are looking at a state of emergency, wherein all perceptions are discarded, that necessarily arises when a thing denies all the concepts and realities of the thing,” Suga wrote.

At the turn of the 1970s, the artist held day jobs in construction and recalls spending time mixing concrete and observing it set into solid form. Probing the interdependence of materials to an absurdist conclusion, with Soft Concrete (1970/2025), Suga proposes the paradox of the titular material remaining pliable rather than coalescing into architecture. With Abandoned Situation (1971/2025), Suga introduces the idea of a sculptural formation that is left to its own course. He placed units of prefabricated roofing material in a serial, longitudinal array and left them at the entrance of the exhibition hall. If anything can be art by virtue of its interpolation within the museum, Abandoned Situation’s exorbitant proportions and lack of a symbolic element and evident aesthetic intent deter subjective projections and question the category of art.

Around 1973, Suga reoriented his practice toward “activations,” that is, events in which he performed the durational transformation of material relationships for the fleeting emergence of sculptural situations. Often the activations were ends in themselves, a way for the artist to stage formal propositions that he then dismantled; at times, the activations resulted in finished works. Created during such activations, Placement of Condition (1973/2025) and Fieldology (1974/2025) demonstrate the increasingly complex and contingent spatial relations the artist explored. In Placement of Condition, fifteen stones bound together by wire lean in multiple directions in a tenuous, interdependent configuration. Fieldology, in turn, is a three-part installation in which straw rope is variously stretched, sliced, and bundled into orderly bales.

In the ensuing decades, Suga grew interested in the concept of “surrounding,” or the area of meaning that emerges around an object. In art museums, for example, the space before a painting or around a sculpture is traditionally the space of interpretation, where visitors read about the work and docents discuss it. That space is not a vacuum to occupy with language, Suga suggests, but a property of things that, at its best, allows us to imagine various meanings. Evincing this interest, Concealed and Enclosed Surroundings (1997) is a translucent, room-size enclosure that both contains the space of the work and obscures the elements within it. Here, Suga wittingly collapses both work and space into one mysterious, prismatic situation.

—Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

Kishio Suga was born in Morioka, Japan, in 1944. He graduated from Tama Art University, Tokyo, with a BFA in oil painting in 1968. At the turn of the 1970s, Suga was a leading member of the Mono-ha (School of Things) movement. Over the past six decades, he has produced sculptural installations that employ unaltered materials to interrogate their relationships with their surroundings as well as the act of perception. His first one-person show took place at Tsubaki-Kindai Gallery, Tokyo, in 1968. Suga has had numerous solo exhibitions in Japan, including those at the Yokohama Museum of Art (1999), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2015), and Iwate Museum of Art, Morioka (2024). In recent years, he has garnered international recognition, marked by his first European retrospective, Situations, at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, and his first institutional presentation in the United States at Dia Chelsea, New York (both 2016–17). He lives in Ito, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan.