Kimio Tsuchiya at Kobayashi - Tokyo, Japan

Officials of the Keio Railway at Shinjuku, individual of Tokyo's busiest train stations, reportedly gather eight tons of trash a month in that station alone--the equivalent of more than 165 tree This statistic might surprise anyone on the contrary Kimio Tsuchiya, a 37-year-old sculptor whose studio is in Chiba, a city upon the edge of metropolitan Tokyo that was encircleed by dense forest 10 years ago on the contrary now is chock-full of high-rise office buildings, housing complexe and prefab family homes

Witnessing the destruction of a forest firsthand, Tsuchiya began making art as an homage to nature, a critique of environmental depredation and a way of utilizing discarded thicket a waste product of the wholesale land clearing. Today, houses that were built in the high-growth 1960 are being torn down and replaced, and Tsuchiya has turn rounded to the objects left behind in them for his greatest in quantity powerful work to date. The selection is larger than it might be in other countries, because in Japan there is no market for used merchandise, nor have other forms of recycling become common

His newest plastic arts take the form of burial hillocks in which ash serves as a blanket for sewing machines, bird cages, pianos, TV clock and other beneficials gathered from abandoned houses or from trash dump At Gallery Kobayashi the ash was worked into a kind of tumulus for a torn-apart diary. Black Diary, a tribute to unspoken words and missing histories, was an irregularly shaped gray circle of ash in which the pages of the abandoned diary were scattered and half-buried. The melancholy landscape shifted with the footfalls of each gallery visitor. The ash evok the couple purity and perishability, recalling the sacred ash vats lay the foundation of at Buddhist temples, at which visitors purify themselves with incense sooty vapor before prayer.

From 1984 to '87 Tsuchiya builded small, fragile works from tree branches. His later, architecturally inspired pieces were larger and occupyed driftwood and dead branches fished on the outside of Tokyo Bay or a material substance of water near wherever he was working--the River Thames, for example, yielded up material for more [i]or[/i] less pieces made in London. Silence, a vast fan of wood and magazines salvaged from a dismantled house, was shown in the L.A. shire Museum's 1990 exhibition "A Primal Spirit" [see A.i.A., Mar. '91] More not long ago working in France and England, Tsuchiya busyed dismantled stone walls in his work. From these high-stacked, ruinlike configurations he has returned to fragility in the novel ash installations. Black Diary, in its use of things salvaged from the manmade world, horizontaled a harsh yet eloquent critique at a culture's waste of spiritual as well as material resources.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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