For Kishio Suga, the exploration of materials—particularly those not traditionally associated with art—has always served as an inquiry into the essence and structure of reality, navigating the space between perception and semantization. Over the course of his career, the Japanese artist has grappled with how form becomes object, and how object becomes meaning, through an epistemology rooted in dynamic, open-ended relationships with matter. In his practice, materials are never treated as static or inert, but rather as agents, conditions and consequences of the continuous transformations born of particles in perpetual motion.
A new long-term presentation unveiled during Upstate Art Weekend at Dia Beacon brings renewed attention to his investigation. It features a series of restaged works spanning from the 1960s through the mid-1990s, many of which are being shown in the United States for the first time. Notably, the presentation reflects on the continued urgency of Suga’s inquiry into the slippages between seeing and knowing, particularly in an era when our relationship to what we still call “reality” has become fully saturated by mediatization and digitization.
Kishio Suga is a central figure of Mono-ha, the so-called “School of Things,” a loosely affiliated group of artists active in the late 1960s and early 1970s who explored the relationships between natural and industrial materials in their raw, unaltered states. Rejecting Western formalism and modernist ideas of the autonomous art object, Suga—like other artists in the group—staged encounters between materials with both conceptual and spiritual rigor, privileging presence and perception over form. These were not compositions in the traditional sense, but situations in which elements encountered one another in space, presented in their raw essence and potential, shifting the emphasis toward context and the forces at play in the environment.
Much like Post-Minimalism in the United States or Arte Povera in Europe, Mono-ha emphasized raw materials and the ongoing processes through which a physical entity might shift, alternate or transmute into another form. Embracing the principle of entropy, Suga rejected the idea of sculpture as a fixed form or static object. Instead, he embraced the inherently unstable nature of reality and the generative potential of that open-ended, fluid dimension where matter and energy are in constant motion.
In emphasizing this contingency, Suga refers to his works as situations. “A situation is rooted in the breakdown of the already present system,” he notes. “It excludes all traits that can be imitated or duplicated.”
In that sense, the artist is not a creator in the traditional sense, but rather an agent or an activator of processes unfolding within space. The artwork becomes an exercise in both phenomenology and epistemology, questioning the very “thingness” of a thing. It invites viewers to encounter the relationships between objects, space and time—not merely through surface perception, but as a fully embodied, contingent experience.
Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical reflections, materiality is not approached as a passive, given entity but as something we encounter that only exists in the act of perception. It is embodied, just as our experience of the world unfolds through the senses and physical interaction. Seeking to draw attention to everything that precedes the conceptualization of reality through cognitive or linguistic structures, Suga works with non-traditional materials as conduits for direct, embodied experience.
As the works in the Dia presentation make clear, Suga has developed a kind of phenomenological palimpsest—an evolving record of material situations—using a diverse array of synthetic substances drawn from the urban and industrial landscape of the late 1960s: concrete, motor oil, paraffin wax, metal, stone. These elements are placed in serial, mutually dependent and often precarious arrangements that subtly subvert expectations of how materials behave. Through processes of repetition, accumulation and sedimentation, Suga suspends conventional notions of function and structure, constructing fragile tensions that test the limits of physical balance and perceptual focus.
These seemingly incoherent configurations invite closer observation. They offer not resolution but disturbance—an invitation to look again, and more attentively. In doing so, Suga challenges the habitual ways we see, use and move through the material world, revealing the often-invisible dynamics of perception and conceptualization that we rely on to make sense of what surrounds us.
In this sense, we can read all these works as philosophical propositions. The tiles, in particular, become especially revelatory of the conceptual depth underpinning Suga’s provocative practice. In works like Abandoned Situation (1971/2025), Suga introduces the notion of a sculptural formation left to follow its own course, quietly questioning what art can be when it is presented outside any formal category, simply as abandoned material occupying space. By placing units of prefabricated roofing material in a serial, longitudinal array, Suga deposits them into the exhibition hall with the same casual inevitability seen in the material encounters of urban degradation. Suddenly, the work takes on a more metaphorical and existential weight, ominously anticipating a post-human vision of what remains, suggesting that even our most engineered, glorious human constructions are ultimately subject to the same inexorable process of erosion and collapse enacted by the slow, indifferent persistence of natural elements.
Curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi explains during a walkthrough of the exhibition that Suga has worked with materials according to two primary strategies. The first is juxtaposition: placing two materials in direct relationship with one another. A striking example is Diagonal Phase the World (1969), in which a wooden lamp beam and a wooden plank are propped against each other, their balance anchored by stones at the base. The tension resides in the interface at which the materials lean into one another in a precarious equilibrium that visibly resists gravity.
In works like Placement of Condition (1973), a contingent ensemble of stones is suspended by taut metal wire, forming a delicate choreography of weight and tension. Once again, the work hinges on the relationship between two materials—how they engage, support and resist one another—inviting close attention to the physical laws and invisible forces that structure the encounter.
The second approach is repetition of a single material, which invites a heightened, almost meditative focus on materiality itself, challenging how we perceive the interplay between a substance and external forces. In Parallel Strata (1969), for instance, Suga stacks blocks of paraffin wax in a columnar formation. As curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi points out, the only true artistic intervention is the choice to use this material and repeat it until it generates a fort-like, architectural structure. The result defies expectations: wax, typically associated with softness, malleability and ephemerality, here takes on a monolithic presence that is structural, assertive and enduring.
A similar logic drives Soft Concrete (1970), where Suga dismantles our assumptions about solidity. Using the typical elements of reinforced concrete—steel and cement—he subtly subverts purpose. The concrete, charged with machine oil, remains soft and viscous, barely contained by a rigid steel framework. The piece exposes the futility of forcing matter into fixed forms, allowing entropy to spill out, refusing closure. In both works, the material becomes a site of philosophical resistance, insisting on its own behavior, and gesturing toward the limits of human attempts to shape, frame or contain the physical world.
“Rather than conceiving sculptures as autonomous objects, Suga stages incongruous, at times absurdist sculptural situations that probe the unstable order of things,” says Guidelli-Guidi. One particularly striking example is Fieldology (1974), a three-part installation in which straw rope is stretched, sliced and bundled into precisely arranged bales. The work functions as a dynamic stage for testing relationships where the dialogue between sculpture and body, matter and energy, unfolds in continuous, cyclical exchange. This performative essence of the interrelational nature of our space in the world is embedded in the very process of making and installing the work.
In this sense, Suga’s inquiries parallel those of artists like Robert Morris and others associated with process art. Yet for Suga, process is never an end in itself but instead an invitation to observe material with radical attentiveness, freed from the assumptions and associations typically linked to construction, monumentality or sculptural permanence.
In the 1970s, Suga was also working construction jobs, and many of the materials he used in his art came directly from those sites: stone, heavy-duty timber, corrugated prefab concrete panels. Viewed through this lens, and with an awareness of the socio-political context of postwar Japan, Suga’s work reveals an undercurrent of political consciousness. His sculptural arrangements become testing grounds for the structures that govern daily life, exposing and unsettling the infrastructures of containment that reinforce power dynamics and social hierarchies within cities and communities. In this sense, his seemingly abstract installations offer a subtle but incisive commentary on the role of architecture in shaping our interaction with both material and societal realities.
To this point, we can also understand how Suga’s work raises questions not only about perception but about human and societal agency itself. For Suga, form is not the manifestation of the artist’s authorial will but the result of conditions. Compared to the notion of site-specificity or site-responsiveness embraced by many American artists of his generation, there’s a key distinction: Suga’s works were often created in relation to a space and then quite literally left there, abandoned to the effects of surrounding phenomena. In this gesture lies a quiet but pointed critique of the anthropocentric worldview, revealing how human presence and action are always part of a broader entanglement of forces and entities, subject to the universal logic of transformation that exceeds any illusion of control or mastery by the homo faber.
In this, we can also detect echoes between Suga’s work and Deleuze and Guattari’s Assemblage Theory, which radically rethinks how things (bodies, objects, ideas, institutions) form dynamic, provisional constellations. Embracing a deterritorialization of form that disrupts any notion of stable identity, Suga’s assemblages welcome the heterogeneity of the human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic, living and inert, physical and discursive. His sculptural situations offer a more precise image of reality as processual, unstable and open-ended.
Within this dimension of potential co-creation with matter—rather than imposition or control—we find affinities even with the radical notion of “vital materialism” in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), a foundational text of post-anthropocentric materialist thought. In both Suga’s practice and Bennett’s writing, the nonhuman world is not merely symbolic or instrumental, but a collaborator in meaning-making—an agent in a field of interdependencies that demands a different kind of political and ecological attunement. As Bennett writes, “the ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it.”
“Kishio Suga” is at Dia Beacon through the summer. Suga’s murder-mystery film, Being and Murder (1999), and video documentation of his performative “activations” will screen for the first time outside of Japan at Dia Chelsea through August 9, 2025.
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