Yoshihiro
Suda

Yoshihiro Suda is known for wielding his outstanding skills to fashion intricate woodcarvings ranging from glorious blooms to nameless weeds, every one indistinguishable from the genuine article, and featuring them in installations that bring a variety of spaces into play. Works carved in Japanese magnolia wood to life-size dimensions and colored using mineral-based and other pigments are placed unobtrusively in the corner of a room, or a small gap in wall or floor, the viewer’s surprise and delight at this unexpected discovery followed swiftly by the experience of a shift in thinking as they perceive the entire space from a new perspective.

In 1993 Suda created an exhibit titled Ginza Weed Theory, setting a wood-carved weed inside a self-made mobile space lined with gold foil and moving this compact “gallery” around parking spaces in Tokyo’s Ginza district. The combination of happening-style setup and intimate presentation gave the exhibit an eccentric harmony that made it a brilliant debut for the young artist. In Tokyo Installation the following year, Suda then built a space with only enough room for one person to enter at a time, installing a carving of magnolia leaves and fruit at the back. The intensity of this solitary, direct engagement with the work encouraged viewers to ponder the installation more deeply.

In contrast to such spaces crafted solely by the artist, Ma (1997) at his first solo show at Gallery Koyanagi was a different kind of experiment, in which carved flowers were scattered on the gallery floor near a real potted sal tree as if fallen from it. At the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art meanwhile, clematis and camellia bloomed alternately from exposed piping in a space once used as a darkroom, in the permanent installation This water unfit for Drinking (2001–21, deinstalled); while at the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, the scarlet rose and petals of Lorenz Rose (2001) were installed along the wall of a white spiral staircase. Weeds (2002) and Rose—Former Payphone Site (2006–26) placed in grooves on wall and floor at Benesse Art Site Naoshima invited the gaze to wander pleasantly, quietly stirring the viewer’s consciousness by turning familiar spaces into something of a different nature; and with his scattering of camellias in Gokaisho (2006), one of the Naoshima Art House projects in which houses and other buildings dotted across the island are converted into artworks, the contrast with the real five-colored camellia in the garden conjured up the resonance and confusion of genuine and counterfeit.

In “The A to Z Guide to the Former Residence of Prince Asaka” exhibition (2024), shedding light on the architecture of the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, the presence of Suda’s fleeting life forms—weeds growing from cracks in tiles, dead leaves gently fallen on floors—encouraged an acute awareness of architectural details often overlooked.

Suda also exhibits his works in the same spaces as antique art, and makes alterations to Buddhist and other sculptures, carving and coloring missing pieces. At 2000’s “Buddha’s Smile (Nenge-misho): Masterpieces of Japanese Buddhist Art” exhibition at the Okura Museum of Art, the artist slipped one of his weeds into the display case housing the Heian-period National Treasure Fugen Bosatsu (Samantabhadra) on an Elephant, while his first such “supplementary” work, Kasuga Sacred Deer (Kamakura period, Odawara Art Foundation collection), produced at the request of Hiroshi Sugimoto, was also exhibited at “Alteration and Adaptation: An investigation” at Gallery Koyanagi (2023). Such chance encounters with antique art, literally making connections across time and space, continue to add depth and richness to a creative practice combining classical techniques with contemporary perspectives.