Kishio Suga: Sculpting the Unstable Order of Things
A groundbreaking exhibition at Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea showcases the work of Kishio Suga, a Japanese artist whose sculptures challenge our fundamental understanding of materiality, perception, and the human relationship to the physical world. Through installations that embrace entropy and resist traditional notions of form, Suga offers a subtle yet incisive commentary on societal structures and the limits of human control.
Suga’s artistic approach often centers on the repetition of a single material, inviting a meditative focus on its inherent qualities and its interaction with external forces. In Parallel Strata (1969), for example, he stacks blocks of paraffin wax into a columnar formation. As curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi observes, the core artistic act lies not in complex construction, but in the deliberate choice of material and its repeated application until it generates an architectural, fort-like structure. This process yields unexpected results: wax, typically perceived as soft and ephemeral, takes on a surprisingly monolithic and enduring presence.
A similar logic informs Soft Concrete (1970), where Suga deconstructs our assumptions about solidity. Utilizing the conventional components of reinforced concrete—steel and cement—he subtly undermines their intended purpose. The concrete, infused with machine oil, remains pliable and viscous, barely contained by a rigid steel framework. This work exposes the inherent futility of imposing fixed forms on matter, allowing for a visible release of entropy and a rejection of closure. In both instances, the material itself becomes a site of philosophical resistance, asserting its own behavior and highlighting the boundaries of human attempts to shape and contain the physical realm.
“Rather than conceiving sculptures as autonomous objects, Suga stages incongruous, at times absurdist sculptural situations that probe the unstable order of things,” Guidelli-Guidi explains. Fieldology (1974), a three-part installation featuring stretched, sliced, and bundled straw rope, exemplifies this approach. The work functions as a dynamic platform for exploring relationships—a continuous, cyclical exchange between sculpture, body, matter, and energy—embedded in both the creation and installation process.
Suga’s inquiries resonate with those of artists like Robert Morris and other proponents of process art. However, for Suga, process is not an end in itself, but rather an invitation to observe material with radical attentiveness, liberated from preconceived notions of construction, monumentality, or sculptural permanence.
His artistic practice is deeply intertwined with his lived experience. During the 1970s, Suga simultaneously worked construction jobs, sourcing materials like stone, timber, and prefabricated concrete panels directly from these sites. This background, coupled with an awareness of the socio-political landscape of postwar Japan, imbues his work with an undercurrent of political consciousness. His sculptural arrangements become testing grounds for the structures governing daily life, exposing and unsettling the infrastructures of containment that reinforce power dynamics and social hierarchies within urban environments and communities. These seemingly abstract installations, therefore, offer a nuanced critique of architecture’s role in shaping our interactions with both material and societal realities.
Suga’s work also prompts reflection on human and societal agency. He views form not as the product of an artist’s will, but as the result of inherent conditions. This contrasts with the site-specificity embraced by many American artists of his generation; Suga’s works were often created in relation to a space and then deliberately left there, exposed to the effects of surrounding phenomena. This gesture serves as a quiet critique of an anthropocentric worldview, revealing how human presence and action are always entangled within a broader network of forces, subject to a universal logic of transformation that transcends any illusion of control.
This perspective echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s Assemblage Theory, which reconsiders how entities—bodies, objects, ideas, institutions—form dynamic, provisional constellations. Suga’s assemblages embrace the heterogeneity of the human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic, living and inert, physical and discursive, disrupting any notion of stable identity and presenting a more accurate depiction of reality as processual, unstable, and open-ended.
Furthermore, Suga’s practice aligns with the radical concept of “vital materialism” articulated by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). Both Suga and Bennett recognize the nonhuman world not as merely symbolic or instrumental, but as an active collaborator in meaning-making—an agent within a field of interdependencies that demands a new kind of political and ecological awareness. As Bennett writes, “the ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it.”
Visitors can experience Kishio Suga’s work at Dia Beacon throughout the summer. Additionally, his 1999 murder-mystery film, Being and Murder, and video documentation of his performative “activations” will be screened for the first time outside of Japan at Dia Chelsea through August 9, 2025.
[Image of Kishio Suga, Soft Concrete (detail), 1970/2025 © Kishio Suga. Photo: Don Stahl]
[Image of Kishio Suga, Fieldology, 1974/2025. © Kishio Suga. Photo: Don Stahl]
