Background
Kishio Suga was born on February 19, 1944 in Morioka, Iwate, Japan.
Tama Art University
Kishio Suga was born on February 19, 1944 in Morioka, Iwate, Japan.
In 1968 Kishio Suga graduated with the Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Department of Painting of Tama Art University. He was influenced deeply by the work of two artists who taught there, Yoshishige Saito and Jiro Takamatsu.
Suga began finding new directions soon after his graduation. He began, like other members of what would come to be called the Mono-ha movement, using raw materials like stone, paper, wood and other natural objects. The group began being called Mono-ha in 1973. He created an important example of this school of art, “Infinite Situation I (Window)”, in 1970. That same year, he received the Grand Prize at the Japan Art Festival.
The artist’s work began being internationally recognized from the early 1970s, and he was invited to present his work at the Biennale de Paris in 1973, and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1986. He has since had solo exhibitions at some of the best-known museums in the world, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.
Suga recently held two major solo museum exhibitions in Japan at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, where he mainly presented historical large-scale installations from the 1970s, when Suga's concepts were highly radical. Works are temporary and never completed, the possibilities of each perceived in a system of remaking at different times, and in different locations. The keen sensibilities of the artist, engaging with the complex, constantly changing environment that surrounds people, in an attempt to divine a universal structure, are reflected in his work.
Suga also set up the Kishio Suga Souko Museum in Itamuro Onsen Daikokuya in Tochigi Prefecture in 2008. The space houses a number of his sculptures as well as outdoor installations in the garden. The Mono-ha Movement was the subject of an extensive show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles in 2012, and Suga had a solo as a part of the proceedings there. The artist was awarded the Mainichi Award in 2016. He currently lives and works in Ito, Sizuoka in Japan.
The Japanese artist Kishio Suga is one of the primary members of the Mono-ha group that began creating ground-breaking art in the 1960s.
