Established in 1959 by one of the foremost Japanese newspapers, Mainichi Shimbun, the annual Mainichi Art Award is given to outstanding figures in the fields of literature, theatre, music, visual art, and film. Past recipients include Lee Ufan, Tadao Ando, Nobuyoshi Araki, Ryu Murakami, Arata Isozaki, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima.
Kishio Suga’s work has been central to the history of site-specific installation since the 1960s. Taking natural and industrial materials, such as stone, wood, metal, paper, rope, and water, and arranging them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states, he focuses on the material qualities and interdependence of these various elements within a given space.
Following his participation in the survey exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, in 2012, he has held solo shows with Blum & Poe in Los Angeles (2012) and New York (2015). The Mainichi Art Award committee selected Suga for the strength of the two major museum exhibitions he presented in 2015, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and the Vangi Sculpture Museum, Shizuoka.
Speaking to Mainichi Shimbun, Suga says: “One could say that times have caught up with my work. Forty years ago, nobody understood it, but these days more people appreciate how my work was trying to stimulate people’s consciousness.”
In September 2016, the HangarBicocca in Milan will present more than twenty installations from the 1970s to the 1990s, Suga’s largest solo exhibition to date and his first at a Western art institution.
