Yoshihiro Suda

Entwistle Gallery, London
Through November 3

Yoshihiro Suda, a young Japanese artist known for his life-sized painted wood flowers and plants, has stated that “the philosophy to my work has one Japanese word: ma. This means ‘nothing,’ ‘between,’ and ‘void,’ yet at the same time means ‘something.’ That is what my work is about. It is about the space which fills the void.”

This almost Zen-like approach was evident in this installation of Suda’s work, an arrangement also geared to heighten appreciation of the immaculate white cube of Entwistle’s recently refurbished space. In this sparse exhibition, the artist showed only three of his beautifully carved, hyper-realist flowers.

Directing our attention towards that which might be otherwise overlooked, he placed his faux botanical objects in unexpected spots where they would be easy to miss. Morning Face (2001), for example, a delicate recreation of a blue-tinted blossom, discreetly emerged from the bottom corner of the white panel announcing the exhibition in the gallery window.

Another work, One Hundred Encounters, Entwistle, London (2001)—which in Japanese means lily—was placed in a ordinary clear crystal vase at the reception desk, while a second lily seemed to grow out of a column in the middle of an otherwise vacant room downstairs. Neither flower possessed that pure whiteness that we associate with the lily; instead they both exhibited a faded chestnut tinge that signified decay and death.

Since the light in the gallery was natural, and none of the works was spotlighted, the casual visitor might have supposed that he had come to the wrong place, that this is a temporarily empty gallery between exhibitions.

While Suda’s floral subject matter is not exactly new, and the technique of polychrome on wood is an ancient one, his particular innovation lies in the subtle placement of these works, and in the gentle reactions they elicit in the observer. Minimalist in tone, the spatial environments that Suda creates are both calming and surprising in effect. This is the place where nature is one with art, and where simple beauty is found in careful attention to ordinary things.




Chiara Zampetti