Suga Kishio - Elements of Alignment 1975 / 2023

Description : 

Elements of Alignment (1975/2023) is an archival pigment print produced for the 60th Anniversary Editions of MoMAK — the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto — documenting one of Suga Kishio’s most direct and enduring site works from the mid-1970s. Signed, dated and numbered by the artist in pencil directly below the image — 17/60 visible in the photograph — in the tradition of Japanese conceptual photo-documentation as both record and artwork.

The image shows two slabs of stone or slate, each marked with parallel white lines, laid end to end across a drainage channel cut into gravel earth. Trees and their roots frame the background. The white lines on each slab are painted or drawn — applied directly to raw material — and the gap between the two elements is not a failure of alignment but its subject: the interval, the space between, the moment where material and void meet and define each other.

Suga Kishio is a central figure of Mono-ha — the Japanese movement of the late 1960s and 1970s that refused the transformation of materials and instead placed them in relation, allowing stone, rope, wood, steel and earth to assert their own presence. Where Western minimalism abstracted materials into geometric form, Mono-ha left them as found, intervening only to arrange encounters. Elements of Alignment is one of the clearest statements of that logic: two slabs, two white lines, a gap, gravel, trees. Nothing is hidden, nothing is fabricated. What is revealed is the relationship itself — alignment as proposition, the interval as content.

The photograph documenting this 1975 work is now itself an edition of 60, printed in archival pigment and carrying Suga’s hand directly in the pencil signature and numbering below the image. It is both document and artwork: the photograph completes the work’s existence in the world, since the original site arrangement was always temporary.

➡️ Contact us for any question

FAQ 

Is this an original Suga Kishio print?
Yes — an original archival pigment print, signed, dated and numbered in pencil by the artist, from an edition of 60.

What does “1975/2023” mean?
The original site work was created in 1975; the archival pigment print was produced in 2023 for the MoMAK 60th Anniversary Edition.

What is Mono-ha?
Mono-ha (literally “School of Things”) was a Japanese avant-garde movement of the late 1960s–70s in which artists placed raw, unaltered materials in relation to one another and to their environment, investigating presence, space and the interval between objects. Suga Kishio is one of its most rigorous practitioners.

What is the MoMAK 60th Anniversary Edition?
A series of editions produced to mark the 60th anniversary of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, pairing landmark works from the museum’s history with new fine art print editions in strictly limited runs of 60.

Do you ship internationally?
Yes — worldwide, with full insurance and tracking.

You might also love Kaws— explore the collection !