The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Around the mid-1980s, Tsuchiya began making sculptures with driftwood and wood scraps. These works were extremely sculptural but they also had an ephemeral quality.They bore certain resemblances to the mono-ha, a movement which flourished in Japan in the early 1970s, and to arte povera in Italy. As form and materials were more important than content in Tsuchiya's works of the 1980s, they could be placed in the tradition of naturalistic formalism. In the early 1990s, as Tsuchiya began using scrap materials from demolished houses, the history of the materials and the process of making the work became more important. Thus, conceptual content became more evident. In this case, a house is a symbol of human life. It refers to the ordinary life of the inhabitants of society, rather than to a heroic life. Such ordinariness is the aspect of life which should be regarded as most typical of human beings. A house conveys a sense of the ordinary lives of individual human beings; it is democratic, peaceful, and profoundly meaningful in its own way, as opposed to the principles of power, heroics and hegemony found in the great history of politics and war. The installations, made with ash obtained by burning the wooden parts of a house, first appeared in 1992 and made an especially deep impression on many people at the time. They compressed the history of the house and the lives of the people who had lived in them into small and frighteningly pure forms. The almost white ashes were spread out like a shadow on the floor in the shape of a simple house, presenting the complexity and weight of human life in minimal symbolic form. Landscape in silence 1994 was first made in Canada using ash from the burning of a dead tree found in Montreal where the exhibition was held. The ash was placed on the floor along with the charred remains of the root and covered by glass set in a round steel frame. The work of the same title shown in the Triennial is also made from the ash of a burnt house but includes too the ashes of diaries sent from Japan. The ash takes the form of the shadow of a house and the date projected onto the work bears testimony to the time during which the house existed. This work refers to the destruction of a house and hence the destruction of the family system; it refers also to the condition of a world without a centre, lacking the traditional foundations of life. Another work, entitled Loss of the essence 1995, symbolises even more clearly the loss of a centre in the world. A bottle, located in the centre of a spherical steel form like a globe, is filled with water and some ash. This piece has strong sculptural qualities as well as critical intentions. According to Tsuchiya, the ash sediment represents memories. After the ash settles it is difficult to see, but it spreads out in the water if the bottle is shaken, symbolising vague memories of the past which occasionally surface in our minds. Tsuchiya takes a melancholy view of a world which has lost its centre, a loss described by Hans Sedlmayr in 1948. With the advent of post-modern thinking in the 1980s, the people of the world have Homage to Historical Process Lives and works in Ma s do, C iba- n, Ja an Far left Detail, Loss of the essence 1995 Left Loss of the essence 1995 Steel, ashes, glass,water 240cm(diam.) Collection: The artist abandoned unified points of view. Tsuchiya laments the current situation of indifference towards the destruction of tradition and houses: no one attempts to carry on the heritage of the past. Tsuchiya is convinced that there is a universal essence in human beings. Because this essence is universal, it existed in the past and will continue to have validity in the future. Therefore, Tsuchiya's chief concern is not time. His scrap wood and ashes symbolise history. 'History' is not just about the past. Tsuchiya is aware that the ideas of the present will determine the history of the past and influence the vision of the future. The city symbolises the relativity and complexity of human life, and the house within the city symbolises the condition and state of the culture and society of human beings. Furnia Nanjo, Independent Curator.Tokyo, Japan ARTISTS : EAST ASIA I 71