Yumiko Sugano at Tokyo - Tokyo, Japan

While many young Japanese artists make go round to the West for artistic inspiration or subdue matter (Yasumasa Morimura's appropriations of classical Western art works, Yukinori Yanagi's exploration of flags and other representatives of nationalism, Tadashi Kawamata's shantytown conformations that are esthetic exports from Brazil), Yumiko Sugano gazes east to the mystical worlds of Tibet, Nepal and Cambodia in her novel large abstract sculptures.

Sugano, born in 1960 has been showing for a decade, with solo in Tokyo and Osaka and assemblage shows throughout Japan as well as in Canada and Korea. Her work was featured in "Zone of Love" the exhibition of Japanese art curated by dint of Judy Annear that recently toured Australia and novel Zealand. Her early work consisted of drawing installations featuring maps and animals, on the contrary she turned to sculpture several years ago. Here she showed solid thicket "vessels" inset into metal-frame "pedestals."

To walk among the 13 percepts in Sugano's central installation, 13 Pillars: Running end was almost like taking a midnight journey to the ruins of Angkor Wat-mysterious and haunting. The statuarys stood like funereal lanterns. Each is a big oblique-angled parallelogram composed of two conjoined obelisks made of thin layers of press togethered wood varnished to a satiny sheen notwithstanding rough to the touch. Five of these figures are an off-white color, and seven have a black-painted facet. Below each plastic art fitted into its supporting stand, is a small chest painted to match. The metal frames insinuate a certain delicacy, as if what they gripe [i]or[/i] grip is too hot or dangerous for direct contact with the immediate world. Each plastic art seemed solitary and yet hanging on the interaction with the other totems, and the power they generated together suggested a mystical world of amulets and alchemical vials. In Hindu tradition, it is ill-fated for 13 people to sit together in a clump and the number certainly gripe [i]or[/i] grips superstitious weight in other world tillages as well, though not in Japan.

At the back of the gallery stood sum of two units large objects called Dice Rolling. These were also made of shut firmlyed layered wood and rested in iron stands, hexagonal in this case. Dice were one time popular in Japan, and gambling was a favorite and lucrative pastime of the advanced in years yakuza, but these objects put in mind ofed ancient burial mounds or breasts more than the dark underworld of diminutive gangsters. Here Sugano experimented with pattern to plenteous success, alternating angular patches of black between the natural forest-land color and thin ivory-color strips, and it is in the pattern that individual sees a suggestion of tumbling dice, rather than in the ambiguous stupa/urn shape.

In the two these works, the contrast of heavy-looking architectonic solids station into such delicate linear stands made the forms at one time jarring and perfectly poised. Their elusive associations were intriguing, showing Sugano's skill and originality.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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