Kensuke Todo Two elements
Kensuke Todo Two elements 1
In praise of stillness My Japanese teacher says to the class: Can anybody tell me how many gods there are in Japan? She primarily means Shinto gods, but not necessarily just these. Eight million, she says. Eight million! It’s a lot. In Japan, there is a god for almost everything: – the stove; the kotatsu, that special futon covered table; the tatami mat. There is a bus stop bench god, she says laughing. God, then, inhabits, is immanent in, the mundane. The everyday world a Japanese person moves though in the execution of their everyday life is quite different from a Judeo-Christian world. In a Christian world this view of god is a kind of idolatry. Kensuke tells me this story. One day his father, for no apparent reason, told him about walking one afternoon through the chaos of Osaka and looking up to see a single futon hanging over the balcony of a high-rise apartment block, how it caught the sun, and simultaneously caught his eye. He said to Kensuke how loaded with melancholic meaning this hanging futon seemed to be against the multiply-repeated abstracted geometry of the high-rise – as if this image were a kind of vision, a beacon, indicating some other, much richer meaning, a meaning about a way of life now so fragile it was on the verge of being lost. A few days later, Kensuke tells me, he sees a futon hanging from an end balcony when he himself is walking through Osaka. It too catches the sun. When he gets home he tells his father – and it turns out that it is the same apartment block, the same futon. This image, the image of a futon on a balcony, becomes much more than just a momentary detail caught in the serendipitous sun – it becomes loaded with a kind of symbolism about the communication between an emotionally distant father, and a physically distant son. Kensuke lives in Australia. And this image was freighted with other meanings for Kensuke – it brought back childhood memories of his grandmother carrying the family’s futons out to the railing to be aired; of how heavy they were, how strong his tiny grandmother must have been to lift them over the railing’s edge.
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And for me it is this, this evanescent way of life that is quickly disappearing, that Kensuke’s new and extraordinarily beautiful sculptures capture. There is a kind of meditative quietness to these works – Airing futon has a powerful sense of inhabited stillness; in Folded futon we can see a shrine-like offering placed reverentially on a pedestal, waiting; while Hanging futon beautifully captures that initial vision that both Kensuke and his father saw. At a conceptual level the works are full of quiet drama, full of implied tension. There is the paradoxical apposition of the soft, the pliable, the human, with the hard, the resistant, the apparently inanimate. In Zabuton, [meaning a futon used to sit on, a floor cushion], just what are the contents of the small sarcophagal box that lies so heavily on it? The drama of this piece is concentrated along the compression lines at the edges of the underside of the rectangle. And yet this rectangle cannot, despite how persuasively the illusion and our temptation to try, be lifted from its ‘cushioned’ base. They are inseparable, these elements are not two, they are one, as they are meant to be. This sculpture is very, very Japanese. There is a different kind of drama in pieces like Complement and Equal and opposite. Here is stillness at its most precarious. There is implication – a sense that here we have change on the very ‘edge’ of happening, a transformation from one state of being into another, a sense that we are witnessing the potential breaking apart of what has been forever together, that the seemingly weak has finally overcome the illusory strong. In Insufficient on the other hand, there is, for me at least, a sense of powerful foreboding, a kind of sinisterness. Just what is the relationship between these two elements, and what exactly is the nature of the drama that is ‘unfolding’ here? While the individual pieces of this exhibition are quite different, they all have a sense that they are not mere sculptural objects – they are not merely inanimate, cold, and unmoving. Instead all of them seem to be in some way inhabited, there is something within them which we respond to. They are animate, they have soul. I can easily see that there is a god here, and that in some extraordinary way this god lives within these very beautiful works, works that Kensuke as the artist has created, has externalized. And in this circular way, Kensuke himself has been incorporated within, and linked to, these sculptures, and thus, to a wider world – the world of reverential things. Mark Henshaw was for twenty five years a Curator in the Department of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia. He is also a writer. His novel The Undeceived which is set in Japan will be published by Penguin Books in 2014.
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Airing futon 2012 mild steel 14.2 x 25.5 x 18 cm 4
Hanging futon 2012 mild steel 17.5 x 29.6 x 6.4 cm 5
Folded futon mild steel 97 x 21.5 x 21.5 cm 6
Equal and opposite 2013 mild steel 122 x 51 x 59.5 cm
Zabuton 2013 mild steel 26 x 70 x 68 cm 7
Drape 2013 mild steel 76.5 x 82.3 x 25 cm 8
Rest 2013 mild steel 24.5 x 48.5 x 106.3 cm 9
Complement 2013 mild steel 45.1 x 19.7 x 46 cm 10
Insufficient 2013 mild steel 28 x 95 x 455 cm 11
Envelop 2013 mild steel 28.5 x 29 x 195 cm 12
Conceal 2013 mild steel 86 x 50.5 x 30.5 cm 13
Study for Drape 2012 charcoal on paper 59.5 x 75.1 cm 14
Study for Equal and opposite 2012 charcoal on paper 59.5 x 42 cm
Study for Corner 2012 charcoal on paper 42 x 59.5 cm 15
Study for Folded futon 2012 charcoal on paper 42 x 59.5 cm
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Study for Insufficient 2012 charcoal on paper 42 x 59.5 cm
Study for Zabuton 2012 charcoal on paper 42 x 59.5 cm 17
Study for Rest 2012 graphite on paper 42 x 59.5 cm
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Study for Rest 2012 graphite on paper 42 x 59.5 cm
Kensuke Todo Born
1975, Kyoto, Japan
Education 2004 2002 2001 1999-2000
Master of Arts (Visual Arts), Canberra School of Art, ANU, Canberra Master of Visual Arts, Canberra School of Art, ANU, Canberra Bachelor of Arts, Kyoto Seika University, Japan Exchange program, Canberra School of Art, ANU, Canberra
Solo Exhibitions 2013 Two elements King Street Gallery on William, Sydney 2010 Time, distance, speed King Street Gallery on William 2008 Gradient King Street Gallery on William 2006 confined spaces king street gallery on burton, Sydney 2004 Ambiguity M16 Gallery, Canberra 2000 Kensuke Todo: The works in Australia Gallery ITEZA, Kyoto, Japan Selected Group Exhibitions 2012 Lyricism:[the abstract in art], King Street Gallery on William, Sydney 2011 2011 Korea International Art Fair 1F Hall A&B, Coex, Seoul Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize Redleaf Council Chambers, Sydney The 60th Blake Prize The National Art School Gallery, Sydney Charlatan Ink Art Prize Manhattan Art Hotel, New York Prometheus Visual Art Award The Prometheus Foundation Gallery, Gold Coast 2010 Audible Surface M16 Artspace, Canberra 2009 Prometheus Visual Art Award The Prometheus Foundation Gallery, Gold Coast Urban King Street Gallery on William, Sydney Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize Redleaf Council Chambers, Sydney City of Hobart Art Prize Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Phoenix Prize Canberra School of Art, ANU, Canberra
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2008
2005 2004 2003 2002
Compositions King Street Gallery on William, Sydney Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra Wilson HTM National Art Prize Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne; Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney; Jan Manton Art, Brisbane Sculpture 2005 Defiance Gallery, Sydney 33rd Alice Prize The Araluen Centre for Arts & Entertainment, Alice Springs The Annual 6” Miniature Sculpture Show 2004 Defiance Gallery, Sydney Horizons Canberra School of Art, ANU, Canberra The Annual 6” Miniature Sculpture Show 2003 Defiance Gallery, Sydney Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights Foyer Gallery, Canberra School of Art, ANU, Canberra New Sculpture New Contemporaries, Sydney Oxygen Canberra School of Art, ANU, Canberra
Commissions & Awards 2013 Outdoor sculpture commission for Commonwealth Club, Canberra 2013 Australia Council for Arts, New Work - Mid Career 2013 arts ACT, ACT ARTS FUND: Project Funding 2009 Phoenix Prize 2008 Wilson HTM National Art Prize- Highly commended 2004 Bronze gum leaf for Blue Gum Community School, Canberra Graduate residency, Canberra School of Art, ANU Emerging Artist Support Scheme M16 studio residency and exhibition Collections Artbank, Australia Arthur Roe Collection, Melbourne Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Blue Gum Community School, Canberra
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Canberra Museum and Gallery Jackson Lalic Lawyers, Sydney Resolution Capital Ltd, Sydney
Bibliography 2012 Dr Meehan, Olivia: ‘An identity re-forged in mild steel: THE WORK OF KENSUKE TODO,’ TAASA Review (The Journal of The Asian Arts Society of Australia), June 2012 2011 Roelants, Altair: ‘Experiences of space,’ australian ART REVIEW, issue 29, Sept 11 2009 Cerabona, Ron: ‘Space and spirit win religious art prize,’ The Canberra Times, Apr 11 Norris, Yolande & Broker, David: ‘Artnotes: Final Phoenix’, Art Monthly, Issue 219, May 2008 Dunn, Jackie: Across the country, state by state, Artbank Catalogue, March Ham, Sofie: Wilson HTM National Art Prize Finalist Exhibition, ArtsHub Australia, Feb 6 Wellington, Robert: ‘The shape of things to come,’ Art Market Report, Issue 29 Wilson HTM National Art Prize, artworkers, Feb Street Shift, Wins Wilson HTM National Art Prize, artworkers, Feb 14 2007 Bevan, Robert: Art & Events, Vogue Living Australia, Jan/Feb. p74 Adolph, Fiona: Artbank, Insite Magazine, p50 2004 Barron, Sonia: ‘Steely shapes of nihilism,’ Canberra Times, Dec 14
Acknowledgements Photography David Paterson, Michael Bradfield Essay Mark Henshaw Design Sam Woods
Supported by
King Street Gallery on William
10am – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday 177 William St Darlinghurst NSW 2010 Australia T: 61 2 9360 9727 kingst@kingstreetgallery.com.au www.kingstreetgallery.com.au Directors: Robert Linnegar and Randi Linnegar
Member of the Australian Commercial Galleries Assocation Registered Valuer with the Australian Government Taxations Incentives for the Arts Scheme Published by King Street Studios P/L 2013 ISBN: 978-0-646-90958-5