The ‘mori’ (Woods) is not simply the natural forest, but it encompasses the forms of the city and nature as viewed from the future. And that view from the future can also be called the view that the dead have on the present.¹

Since the 1970s, Shigeo Toya has been investigating the nature of sculpture, perception and materials, working almost exclusively with wood, particularly tree trunks. Toya studied sculpture at Aichi Prefecture University of Fine Arts and came to prominence in the post-Mono-ha period, representing Japan at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988. His best-known, and ongoing, series of works is entitled ‘Woods’. These take the form of a stand of squared-off trunks, set out in a tightly closed square, in serried single file or as an open grid — variously suggesting a dense copse, line of trees or forest.

Woods III 1991–92 is laid out as a grid of standing trees, the formal beauty of its regular spacing intimating infinite space as an endless sweep of forest, and infinite time as the witnessing of silent sentinels. The top of each trunk is carved with a chainsaw, the artist incising parallel linear cuts with jagged edges that evoke twisted branches or foliage. The roughness of the cuts reveals the inner layers of the material; its interior comes to the surface: ‘On the inside of the ‘mori’ (Woods) there are many complex spaces and viewpoints. I have added their structures to the surface of my sculptures’.² Toya speaks of these structures as creases or folds, and has also compared them to Bernini’s sculptural explorations of folds in fabric.³

The textures and patterning of the tops contrast with the sobriety of the solid trunks. This is further underlined through the rubbing onto the textured surfaces of the ashes of burned wood cuttings, as well as through the rivulets of acrylic paint that run down the trunks. Toya has developed a concept he calls ‘minimalbaroque’ to describe this relationship between patterned or Baroque complexity and minimal simplicity. He says:

‘Minimal’ in fact entails complexity, while Baroque contains not just darkness but also simplicity. ‘Minimalbaroque’ is also the quest for a point of harmony between passion and morality. I think it is necessary to introduce the structure of the ‘mori’ (Woods) into this border area between these two concepts.⁴

This reference to the Baroque forms part of a larger reflection on the cultural history of Modernism and sculptural Minimalism in European and North American traditions. Toya sets out consciously to liberate his work from the constraints of this history, while also engaging with it — by ‘trying to reconstruct the culture that was native to north-eastern Asia’.⁵ Rather than focusing on sculptural techniques of modelling, carving and construction, he lays bare the qualities of the material to bring its internal structure to the surface.⁶ A haiku by Basho provides a point of reference for the artist’s discussion of matter and perception:

Such stillness –
The cries of the cicadas
Sink into the rocks.

The haiku interchanges ‘space and substance as well as subject and object’, a dual reciprocity that Shigeo Toya says expresses the state of his sculptures and the way that he inhabits the interior: ‘I am still inside the rocks and thus become one with the space around me. This is the very space where stillness prevails. This mass of compressed space which controls stillness, I call sculpture’.⁷

Endnotes

1. Artist statement, ‘First Kiev Biennale of Contemporary Art’ 2012, viewed 18 May 2014.
2. Artist statement.
3. Interview with Okabe Aomi, 15 June 2007, viewed 25 May 2014.
4. Artist statement.
5. Artist statement.
6. Shigeo Toya, ‘March 1990’, in Toya Shigeo: Selected Works, 1984–1990 [exhibition catalogue], Hakushindo Co. Ltd, Niigata, 1990, p.5.
7. Shigeo Toya, ‘Artist’s statement’, in Barbara Bloemink, A Natural Order: The Experience of Landscape in Contemporary Sculpture [exhibition catalogue], Hudson River Museum, New York, 1990, p.40.

Feature image: Shigeo Toya’s Woods III, installed for ‘We Can Make Another Future’, GOMA, February 2015 / © Shigeo Toya / Photograph: N Harth, QAGOMA