Kishio Suga

Law of Situation (1971/2017) on view at the 57th Venice Biennale, VIVA ARTE VIVA, curated by Christine Macel
May 13 – November 26, 2017

For the 57th Venice Biennale, Kishio Suga was invited to re-create one of his most important early works, Law of Situation (1971), in the Gaggiandre shipyard behind the Arsenale. Law of Situation was first conceived for the 4th Modern Japanese Sculpture Exhibition at the Ube City Open-Air Museum in 1971. Consisting of ten flat stones placed in a line on a twenty-meter length of glass fiber that floated on a lake, the work was an arresting example of Suga's exploration of ephemeral "situations" (jōkyō) -- the interdependence of natural and industrial materials in a given site. Suga remade Law of Situation for the second time in 1995 — this time indoors — for the landmark survey Matter and Perception 1970: Mono-ha and the Search for Fundamentals at the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan. He adapted the work for a rectangular pool in the museum's atrium, covering it with bubble wrap and acrylic sheets, and overlaying it with dozens of stones in an irregular grid. This third iteration of Law of Situation at the Venice Biennale marks a return to an outdoor setting, floating in the docks behind the Arsenale.