Homage to “Cut-off” series by Katsuro Yoshida: No. 2 (Stone-Rope-Steel-Wood)
2025
Kinetic sculpture
Stone, Rope, Steel, Wood
Katsuro Yoshida, my grand master in Japan, was an artist of the Mono-ha (Material-School) which was a postwar Japanese avant-garde movement. At the end of the 1960s, he created a series of sculptures entitled Cut-off that combined unprocessed materials and objects. Yoshida Katsuro pursued making things manifest their true nature by human hands, rather than having them processed and used by humans to achieve a certain goal. This contains a critical look at modern Japan, which imitated modern Western colonialism that attempted to bring the world under its control, ran amok, and then collapsed.
While I didn’t have a chance to see Yoshida as he passed away in 1999, his idea and spirit highly influenced me through my master, who was a disciple and a studio assistant to him, and also many people in Tokyo art scene who were close to Yoshida. To rethink about his exploration of the relationship between object and human as deconstruction of the modern civilization’s controllership over the world, I started making raw material sculptures as an homage to Yoshida’s Cut-off series. In this work, the specificities of materials, such as weight, elasticity, or solidity, mesh together while they are free from the functional purpose. And viewers can interact with it by touching a hanging stone to relate to this world of material.
*Viewers can gently touch a stone suspended by rope.
Displayed at the group show "Body as Land, Land as Memory"
April 4 - 28, 2025
Blockfort, Columbus OH