Experiences of Space

Posted: 22 Nov 2011

The sleek lines of Japanese-born artist Kensuke Todo’s (b.1975) mild steel sculptures reflect the contrasting realities of Japan and Australia between which his life and identity oscillate. Within his work, the artist explores these differences through the conflicting concepts of western and Japanese space – one based on knowledge (vertical) and the other spirituality (horizontal) and how humans move within them.

Interweaved with Todo’s memories of Japan, his sculptural works depict urban structures removed from their source and often in unusual configurations, distilling his impressions in the weight of cold steel here in Australia. They invite us to imagine their silhouettes as blank metallic canvases for a flurry of human activity and their materiality reminds us that the “impetus to motion and mobility, for a space of flows, can only be achieved through the constructions of stabilisations”1.

From an early age, Todo was surrounded by books on western art and aesthetics in his family home in Kyoto and encouraged to explore these principles by a father whose own design profession was influenced by European practices. Interestingly, in light of Todo’s recent work, the artist came close to pursuing a career in architecture (being accepted on his university’s affiliated course) but ultimately the creative freedom and object-based approach of sculpture appealed to him more. His early works were social in content and often sought to escape the flatness he disliked in the art of Japan. Inspiration came from the Japanese sculpture Isamu Noguchi while he also cites Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, Anthony Gormley and Donald Judd as ongoing influences. For the majority of his career Todo has sculpted in steel, his material of choice because of its availability and also its obvious reference to industrial use and implications of weight.

Todo first visited Australia in 1999 as part of an exchange program between Kyoto Seiki University and Canberra’s School of Art (SoA), ANU, during his Bachelor of Arts degree. After subsequent visits the artist relocated to Canberra permanently in 2003, where he went on to study a Master of Visual Arts and to hold a Graduate Residency at SoA in 2004. As Todo explains, coming from Japan where “space is precious” and society is shaped by a “conformist and hierarchal” structure, he appreciates both Australia’s physical and social space. As an artist, he is able to express his individuality more freely, as he’s not defined by a culture’s aesthetic or its expectations. Life in Australia has made Todo more attuned to the strong Japanese influences within his work, and despite experimenting with Western spatial constructs, he keeps returning to the geometric lines and stillness associated with a Japanese aesthetic. Subsequently, the artist’s Australian body of work embraces his cultural identity as a means to understand, and connect with, the here and now. Todo draws largely on his memories and recent impressions of Japan, formulating many of his ideas during the return trips he makes home to visit family and friends. It appears, as an outsider, his observations and experiences of place are heightened by a sensitivity that the distance of his new home affords him.

In 2004, Todo started to experiment with spatial constructs by incorporating architectural elements into his work to create a series of miniature steel apartments which depict the proximity of people’s lives in Japan. Exhibited in the solo show Confined Spaces 2006, these sculptures are squat, dark, claustrophobic dwellings which seem both uninviting and unnaturally austere — an antithesis to his new life in Australia. As Todo’s career has developed, his works have become progressively lighter as his focus has shifted to trace human movement within such urban environments. This change of direction can be recognised in the artist’s next solo exhibition Gradient 2008 — a series of freestanding escalators and staircases that explore the flows of vertical human traffic. Todo initially conceived the idea for these works during a trip to Osaka in Japan where residents live in cramped apartment blocks, their entry and exit to the world via a maze of staircases. Todo’s black steel sculptures are distorted renditions of these forms, as they are pushed and pulled through the vertical and horizontal passages of space. Flights of stairs are blocked or are reworked into strange formations that double up or reach out into forks. While escalator belts are rendered dormant and devoid of passengers or a destination. In these gestures — which see objects removed from their original context and stripped of their functionality — Todo plays with the directional assumptions inherent in their forms and the ‘imagined’ vertical human passage that they evoke.

Similarly, Todo often considers the ‘negative space’ around a potential sculpture when trying to generate an idea — purposely enticing the viewer to navigate these boundaries in order to introduce horizontal flow within the work and a relationship between the audience and sculptural object.

After another excursion to Japan in December 2008, which took Todo through ribbons of newly built expressways, under passes and bridges, the artist began to address horizontal lines more directly. Todo was fascinated with the possibility of rendering these dual sensations of speed (the horizontal) and height (the vertical) within sculptural form — resulting in the successful exhibition Time, Distance, Speed 2010. As with previous work, there is a graceful and somewhat surprising element to these lines carved from dark, cool steel. Each section of road, bridge and ramp is extracted and isolated in a sudden moment of stillness, ripped from the traffic-clogged expressways of Japan.

In stark contrast, Todo’s current project focuses on a quintessential, and undeniably motionless, Japanese object — the futon mattress. His home town of Kyoto, once a small and isolated city, is now awash with expensive apartments due to rapid redevelopment and shifts in lifestyle, yet futon mattresses still hang out to air over those shiny new balconies. Todo is interested in this contradiction: the luxurious lives that still hold traditions tight — wealth juxtaposed with the common futon. In Japan, as he explains “opposites are always combined, thrown up against one another — the wealthy, poor, the dirty the clean. This isn’t a planned society rather one in which things just happen.”

Within Kensuke Todo’s sculptures we see a continual push and pull of the horizontal lines of Japan and the vertical of Australia. The artist’s attempts to understand these differences illustrate that space is never closed, or easy to define, rather “there will always be loose ends, always relationships with the beyond, always potential elements of chance”2.

1 D. Massey, For Space, Sage Publication, London, 2005, p.95.
2 D. Massey, For Space, Sage Publication, London, 2005, p.95.

Images from top:

Kensuke Todo, Exit and Entry Ramp, 2010, mild steel, 87 x 120 x 240cm. Photograph David Paterson.

Kensuke Todo, Indefinite I, 2008, mild steel, 106.6 x 79 x 54cm. Photograph David Paterson.

Kensuke Todo, Junction l, 2010, mild steel, 10 x 79 x 101cm. Photograph David Paterson.

Kensuke Todo, Takashimaya Department Store Kyoto, 2007, mild steel, 43.6 x 71 x 16.3cm. Photograph David Paterson.

 Kensuke Todo, Hanshin Expressway, 2010, mild steel, 14 x 26 x 95cm. Photograph David Paterson.

Kensuke Todo, Junction ll, 2010, mild steel 90 x 107.6 x 75.1cm. Photograph David Paterson.