Inscriptions & excavations

Sun 22 Sep 2024

Among the most memorable contributions to the inaugural Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1993, Shigeo Toya’s Woods III 1991–92 became one of the first large-scale installations to enter the Queensland Art Gallery Collection (illustrated). Here we seek to draw out ideas of inscription and excavation in Toya’s practice by placing Woods III in dialogue with selected works from our extensive collection of contemporary Japanese art.

Consisting of 30 squared-off tree trunks elaborately carved with a chainsaw and arranged in an orderly open grid, Shigeo Toya’s Woods III 1991–92 is celebrated for its formal beauty as well as its poetic and philosophical allusions. Born in mountainous Nagano in 1947, Toya studied sculpture at a time when the group of artists known as Mono-ha (‘the school of things’) was transforming possibilities for Japanese art. Led by the philosophically trained Lee Ufan, the Mono-ha artists drew on critiques of the ego to shift the emphasis of artmaking away from creating new objects, and towards presenting physical things in their raw, unadorned immediacy. Toya expanded on these positions from the perspective of his experience as a sculptor; he sought to realise Mono-ha’s focus on materiality and encounter by restoring a degree of artistic labour — albeit through unconventional means.

‘Woods III’ installed in the inaugural Asia Pacific Triennial

Shigeo Toya ‘Woods III’ 1991–92

For Toya, the recesses and crevices created by his chainsaw laid bare the internal material qualities of the wood. The act of carving is at once an inscription — evidence of the artist’s intervention through writing or mark‑making — and an excavation, removing accumulated layers to reveal what they might conceal. The archaeological sensibility of excavation extends to the gridded arrangement of the trunks in Woods III. While their spacing and materiality recall the experience of walking through a copse, as the work’s title suggests, their geometrical placement directly references the ancient streets of Pompeii, whose ruins were preserved beneath ash in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. This reading is underscored by the pale ash rubbed into the lumber, and rivulets of white acrylic that run faintly downwards, suffusing the trunks’ sobriety with a ghostly aspect.

Works that expand on these themes as they relate to creativity, time and the natural and constructed world, while preserving the sense of stillness at the installation’s heart can be seen in Lee Ufan’s From line 1977 (illustrated) and Tokihiro Sato’s Breath-graph no.21 1988 (illustrated). Here traces of artistic gesture in painting and photography respectively, are focused on the movement of the arm, the regulatory function of breathing, and the time elapsed in producing the work. In Yoko Asakai’s ‘Passage’ photographs (illustrated), and in Nakamura Yuta’s Atlas of Japanese Ostracon (illustrated), inscription operates alongside excavation, giving form to the invisible with a focus on what is left behind.

Lee Ufan ‘From line’ 1977

Lee’s ‘From line’ series was produced in the period following his Mono-ha activities, in which he explored the materials and processes of painting. These works were executed with a round, almost calligraphic brush, loaded with raw cobalt blue pigment and dragged down the canvas in a single, flowing motion. Each stroke begins thick with paint and thins out as the line progresses, the artist then reloading the brush to execute more lines in sequence, controlling his breathing throughout to ensure consistent application across the face of the canvas

Tokihiro Sato ‘Breath-graph no. 21’ 1988

Similarly, Sato’s commandingly scaled Breath-graph uses the device of long camera exposure to record traces of human performance — registered as points of light — without depicting the body of the performer. The work was shot in the brutalist foyer of the artist’s university campus, with a dark filter over the camera lens and the shutter left open for three hours, during which Sato used a penlight to make vertical gestures in the air as he moved through the space, exploring every visible platform within his physical reach.

Asakai Yoko ‘Passage’ series 2011

Asakai researched weather patterns in Japan’s northern Aomori Prefecture, where heavy fogs and freezing breezes are a fact of life, then drove vast distances to photograph LED road signs that are attached to aerovanes measuring windspeed and direction. With great patience, she was able to capture winds of each of the major compass points. Made in the wake of Fukushima disaster, as wind direction took on a new and ominous meaning, Asakai’s eerie photographs here echo Toya’s evocation of Pompeiian streets frozen in time, seeking visible markers for potentially catastrophic invisible forces.

Nakamura Yuta ‘Atlas’ 2016

For his ‘Atlas’, Nakamura travelled extensively through Japan’s former pottery-producing regions to collect potsherds — ceramic fragments such as aging tiles fallen from the surface of old houses, or shards littering rivers and beaches. He presents the potsherds in elegant displays alongside postcards and texts identifying their source, evoking images of each region and the lifestyle of a given era. Nakamura’s ‘Atlas’ excavates and orders shards of ceramic objects to explore moments of regional history when craft operated at the intersection of art and architecture, embodied in techniques that disappeared in the wake of industrialisation, of which only fragments remain.

Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, QAGOMA

‘Woods III: Inscription and Excavation’ / Gallery 14, Queensland Art Gallery / 2 March 2024 – 27 January 2025