Text (Artist Statement)

Hiraku Suzuki

20 years ago, I drew my first signs using the veins of dead leaves that I had gathered. Ever since, the practice of creating for me has continued to be an act of excavation that serves to newly re-examine and understand the world. Tracing back further, I suppose it had started from the time I was producing music referred to as “dub,” which appropriates collected environmental sounds as a source material, and remixes it them while amplifying their reverberations.

At one point however, I realized that it was not enough to simply discover and relocate fragments of an existing world. What I needed to do was create an alternative language. In this respect, I started to engage in attempts of fabricating the very fragments of the world itself. It is an act like causing a kiss mark to exist before the kiss. The traces always come before meaning, as does reflection before substance, and negative before positive.

Like Arthur Russell’s World of Echo, a musical work created solely by traces of sounds, “dub” is a technique which implies a world that used to exist / should come.
I therefore started to use silver and other light reflective mediums that could invert things by once erasing materiality and meaning through the phenomenon of light. For instance, while one had previously peeked out at the light from the eye of a needle found on the street, now a vector is created that enables a thread of light to pass through the needle hole.

Recently, the accumulated act of drawing has gradually come to approach the act of “weaving.” The fragments of signs that are born one after another though instant improvisational gestures are twisted together, enabling a certain sense of order to emerge like a piece of woven textile. In other words, I feel that what has started is an attempt akin to writing a long text using another language.

November 2019
contribution to the exhibition “MOT Annual 2019 Echo after Echo : Summoned Voices, New Shadows” at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

 

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