KISHIO SUGA: WRITINGS, VOL.1 (1969–1979)
Edited by Andrew Maerkle, Ashley Rawlings, and Sen Uesaki, this is the first of a three-volume anthology that makes Suga’s thinking accessible to English readers as a comprehensive body of work for the first time.
Developed in conversation with local and international movements of the time, such as Anti-Art, Conceptual art, and Land art, Suga’s theoretical writings were a driving factor in advancing his artistic project. At turns poetic and philosophical, and always playfully combative, his texts argue for art to be an immersive field of radical equality with-and-among all things. The translations collected here make Suga’s thinking accessible to English readers as a comprehensive body of work for the first time. Included in this volume are early critical reflections composed under the pseudonym Katsuragawa Sei, fragmentary statements presented in the exhibition listings of the art journal Bijutsu Techō, and groundbreaking long-form essays from the first decade of Suga’s career.
In the back matter, Ashley Rawlings’ essay “Infinite Situations in Translation: On the English Titles of Kishio Suga’s Artworks” describes how the artist makes unique use of the Japanese language in his artwork titles, constructing neologisms consisting of “two, three, or four characters written together in a sequence that has a foreignizing effect on established Japanese and Chinese usage.”
Hardcover; 264 pages, illustrated in black & white and color
Texts in English
Milan: Skira Editore; Los Angeles: Blum & Poe; São Paulo: Mendes Wood DM, 2021
ISBN: 978-88-572-4561-4
24.4 x 17.4 x 2.6 cm
Volume 2 is due to be published in spring 2024.
Click here to download the following extracts from Volume 1.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. KATSURAGAWA SEI, 1969
- Transform Space: From Future Notes (1969/2014)
II. EXHIBITION STATEMENTS, 1972–1981
- Individual Sight (1972)
- Not Anything to Do With . . . (1974)
III. 1970–1979
- Existence beyond Condition (1970), translated by Mika Yoshitake