“I didn’t want to buy or gather flowers. I wanted to carve them.” Meet one of Japan’s most popular artists, Yoshihiro Suda.
“From the very start until now, my idea is that the plants and flowers I carve are just a part of the work. The space around the artworks is also a part of the work.”
Yoshihiro Suda is known for his realistic sculptures and carvings of plants and flowers. He was born in the countryside of Yamanashi Prefecture, where he grew up at the foot of Mount Fuji and lived surrounded by nature until the age of 18 years old. He studied at the Tama Art University, where his love for contemporary art and wood carving began.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Suda was looking for a venue for his first exhibition.
“I would walk around the city. And I noticed the parking meters along the road. I found this a very attractive space. So, I decided to pay at the parking meter and make my exhibition there.” He created a box trailer and placed it at the parking meter, where people could enter and see his artwork.
Influenced by the great Japanese sculptors, Suda pushes the limits and ideas of what a work of art is or should be. He sees the surrounding space as an essential part of the artwork itself.
“Now, I have been doing my craft for more than 30 years. And it’s safe to say that your craft gets better the more you do it. But arts and crafts are something you have to cultivate inside of you all your life.”
Jens H. Jensen interviewed Yoshihiro Suda in July 2022 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum in Japan.
Yoshihiro Suda (born in 1969 in Yamanashi, Japan) is a Japanese artist known for his hyper-realistic sculptures of plants and flowers created in the tradition of Japanese wood carving. Major exhibitions include Ginza Weed Theory 1993, in Tokyo, 2004, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Arts, Kagawa, in 2006. At Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Yoshihiro Suda has contributed to Standard (2001) and Naoshima Standard 2 (2006-2007) and has created the commissioned work, Weeds (2002). Suda also showed his work at Galería Elvira González, Madrid, Spain, and Loock Galerie, Berlin, in Germany.
Camera by Yudai Maruyama
Produced by Christian Lund
Edited by Malte Bruun Fals
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023.
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