— The world alienates sculpture.
The world is constructed and carved by the gaze.
It “constructs” like it “carves,” and it “carves” like it “constructs.”
“Carving” exposes “constructs,” and “constructs” entice “carving.”
“Carving” is the gaze to see the gaze.
“Constructing” is to shove things into the gaps cut through by the gaze.
For The Second Hara Annual exhibition in 1981
Shigeo TOYA
About Exhibition
ShugoArts is pleased to announce the opening of Body of the Gaze by Shigeo Toya from the 21st of September.
— Why do we add ‘sculpture,’ an excess, into this world even though the world is perfect in its own right?
As a student, experiencing the transition of contemporary sculpture from the 1960s to 1980s, Shigeo Toya sought his artistic style in the history of essential senses by reclaiming sculpture from the conceptual world. According to Toya, “The human urge to create most likely originates in a certainty that something exists where there is nothing.” And then, he goes on to propose us a question, “How do we make sculpture depicting the invisible exist in the visible world again?” His hypothesis and subsequent scrutiny assures us that his practice extends beyond modern sculpture and is deeply connected to ontological questions that us humans have had since ancient times.
Shigeo TOYA, Bamboo GroveⅡ, 1975
In 1975, Toya made a performance piece named Bamboo Grove as a device in order to realize sculpture representing the invisible. In Bamboo Grove, the artist stretches ropes between bamboo trees without touching any bamboo and walks through the bamboo grove holding the ropes in the same way. This performance visualizes the trajectories of his gaze and the traces of his walk while creating an intersection between the gaze and body. By making invisible lines visible, negative spaces positive, and altering the relationship between the seen and the unseen, Toya presented his sculptural philosophy in which he argued that sculpture be created from the integration of the numerous gazes. Since then, he has produced many works of sculpture such as his masterpiece Woods, whose structure is carved by an assemblage of diagonal lines of the gaze, and the rest is history.
Shigeo TOYA, Woods IX, 2008, Installation view at Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, 2011-12, Photo by Tadasu Yamamoto
Shigeo Toya’s sculptures and discourse up to now, including this exhibition Body of the Gaze, have retained consistency and the body of his work is an example of how his sculpture discourse can develop over time. With his new artworks, Toya skillfully visualizes absence which can be culminated in a mass carved by flashes of his chainsaw, or the gaze to be more specific. Body of the Gaze provokes an assemblage of the very title while creating its own aura or excavating invisible ruins and relics in order for the viewer to see the sculptural body of the gaze in one’s head through tactile sensations of the gaze. This is a chance to witness a part of the 72-year-old sculptor Shigeo Toya’s half-century-old sculptural view. Please visit us while the exhibition is on view.
August 2019, ShugoArts
Installation movie
2019.09, ShugoArts
Interview movie
Information
2019.9.21 Sat – 10.19 Sat
ShugoArts
11am ‒ 7pm, Closed on Sun, Mon and Public Holidays
From 5pm to 7pm, Sat., September 21, 2019
ShugoArts
Born in Nagano, Japan, in 1947. Currently lives and works in Saitama. Toya started his artistic career with his attempt to reconstruct sculpture as a medium, which had been deconstructed by the preceding art movements such as postminimalism and mono-ha. Since the 1970s, the artist has diligently pursued the principles and structures of sculpture, which resonate with the epistemological foundations of our very existence, underscoring their essence and possibility through his artmaking practice. By manipulating various art histories of all times and places, encompassing the period of cave paintings and Greco-Roman sculptures to contemporary art, with his bona fide sculptural philosophy, Toya has been recognized as one of the leading sculptors in Japan, Asia and the Pacific at large. The artist received the Art Encouragement Prize of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Japan in 2004 and his Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon in 2009. He is also a Professor Emeritus at Musashino Art University.
Selected exhibitions: Toya Shigeo Sculpture, Nagano Prefectural Art Museum, Nagano, 2022-2023, The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, 2023; Body of the Gaze: from Scatter to Linkage, from Linkage to Accumulation, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2022; Shigeo Toya Forest – Lake: Regeneration and Memory, Ichihara Lakeside Museum, Chiba, 2021; Body of the Gaze, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2019; Shigeo Toya−Sculpture to Emerge, Musashino Art University Museum & Library, Tokyo, 2017; Memories in the cave, Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka, 2011-12; Shigeo Toya : Folds, Gazes and Anima of the Woods, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Aichi, 2003; The 3rd Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, 2000; Forest of Visions, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, 1995; Yama – Mori ‒ Mura, Kuma Museum of Art, Ehime, 1994; The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1993; The 43rd Venice Biennale, Japanese Pavilion, Venice, 1988; Selected publications: Shigeo Toya−Sculpture and Words (Choukoku-To-Kotoba）1974-2013, Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, 2014; Shigeo Toya−Sculpture to Emerge, Musashino Art University Museum & Library, 2017
