Hiraku Suzuki

Excavation Today　2023

venue: The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Gallery 4, 5
dates: 16.09.2023 – 19.12.2023
works: Impressions of Iwajuku Site(2023) / Interexcavation(2019) / Constellation(2018-2021) / The Writing of Meteors (S/S) (S/M) (S/L) / Impressions of Kannonyama Kofun / The Marker of Nature / Shiraoi Session
photo: Ooki Jingu

The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, is pleased to present the exhibition, “Hiraku Suzuki: Excavation Today.”

For Hiraku Suzuki, the line is a medium that connects language and pictures, inside and outside, self and others, and promotes interpenetration. The act of drawing lines is an excavation of the (invisible) lines that exist throughout the universe, and if such lines are perceived as hollow passages or tubes like tunnels, they indeed become a means to correspond with the world or the universe, transcending the dichotomy between human beings and nature, subject and object.

This exhibition features a large-scale installation of 40 works from the latest series The Writing of Meteors (2023), works from the recent series Constellation (2018–21) and “Interexcavation” (2019), as well as a number of murals produced on site.

As indicated by its title, The Writing of Meteors references French intellectual Roger Caillois’ book, The Writing of Stones (1970). The work is an accumulation of various signs, such as the trajectory of light reflected from stones moving in space, and as if in response to the vast amount of information contained in anonymous stones the artist found in his immediate surroundings, attempts to inscribe lines that continue to be generated on a time axis far beyond human history, as a new form of language.

The venue for the exhibition is the museum’s Contemporary Art Building (completed in 1997), designed by architect Arata Isozaki (1931–2022), who sadly passed away last year. Isozaki conceived of the building as a cavity through which works of art would pass. As if echoing this concept, Suzuki, in pursuing the origin and future of drawing and writing, creates a series of lines from exhibition room to exhibition room, from the caves where the oldest wall drawings of humankind are preserved to outer space where creation and annihilation are repeated beyond human knowledge.

Hiraku Suzuki, who day after day persistently engages in the act of drawing/writing and attempts to seek out lines as means to excavate moments when the past and present intersect, continues to expand the concept of drawing, all the while renewing the possibilities of expression in our present age. The installation in this exhibition serves to communicate his current position within this ceaseless and unwavering endeavor.