Kishio Suga: Writings, vol. 2, 1980-1989

The second volume devoted to one of the key figures of his generation in Japan.

One of the key figures in Japan's pivotal Mono-ha phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s, artist Kishio Suga has realized a visionary practice of ephemeral, sites-pecific installations and performative interventions into the everyday environment. Throughout Suga's career, writing has been an important element in his artistic process, as he uses his texts to interrogate the institution of art and anthropocentric conceptions of the world.

This volume collects Suga's writings from the period 1980-89, when the Japanese art scene was transformed by a museum-building boom triggered by the country's rise to unprecedented economic heights. Having challenged conventional definitions of art through his formulations of the "[thing]" and "being left" a decade prior, Suga shifts his focus in the 1980s toward working with the collective logic of the world. In particular, he embarks on a sustained investigation into the dynamics of "[periphery] surroundings" as the basis for an approach to artmaking in which subject and object are equalized and the marginal or unseen takes on as much significance as that which is centered or seen. Included here are the aphoristic fragments that Suga compiled for his retrospective monograph Kishio Suga, 1988-1968, short statements composed for exhibition catalogues, and long-form essays published in art journals and other magazines during the period, many of which appear in English for the first time.