YUKIO FUJIMOTO

—Yukio FUJIMOTO, September 2024

At ShugoArts, we will be hosting a solo exhibition of Yukio Fujimoto, marking his first show in four years since the 2020 online exhibition. In this exhibition, we will cover the gallery floor with 800 unglazed tiles and present BROOM (TILE). This work comes to life by allowing the viewers to walk on the tiles themselves, while the process of their weight gradually causes the tiles to make sound and crack. Our bodies, like the needle drawn to a record, are constantly in contact with the Earth’s surface due to gravity, generating various sounds through friction and vibration. The tile work was first presented in 2002 at a gallery in St. Ives, a pottery town in southwestern England. Since then, it has been reinterpreted and recreated in various locations, including the Otani Memorial Art Museum in Nishinomiya and as part of the Growing from the Soil art project in Mino. This will be the first presentation of the series in Tokyo, offering a rare opportunity for attendees to participate in the artwork.

Additionally, this exhibition will feature new pieces from Fujimoto’s long-running SUGAR series. In SUGAR, cubes of sugar are placed in a glass tube and spun, causing the sugar to gradually collide and break apart, ultimately transforming into a pure white granulated form.

Since the 1980s, Yukio Fujimoto has been creating works that provoke new perceptions. These include CHAIR WITH EARS, which allows the audiences to listen to the surrounding environment and the exhibition space through artificial ears that are almost two meter-wide, and DELETE, where the viewers visually recognie labels on grooveless records so that they can play music in their heads. In this exhibition, we will explore how readymade objects transform into different forms through the invisible forces of gravity and rotational force, prompting questions about the nature of the things we perceive as everyday realities. Please join the exhibition and experience the works.