Ronald Jones - YOSHIHIRO SUDA
To simply look at Yoshihiro Suda's wooden sculptures of plants will not do - they demand scrutiny. Approaching each object, one should get as close as possible. These sculptures can induce a trance-like state, as if you were a future astronaut lifting a wrinkly reddish Martian rock right up to your mirrored visor, or a botanist eyeballing a species that only a moment before was totally unknown. Suda's style prescribes the path towards discovery.
Shifting gears from perception to the history of art, h is sculptures of plants invite obvious comparisons: a flowering Magnolia blossom, for example, summons a memory of the 13th-century Chinese artist Ch'ien Hsuan - with whom Suda shares a devotion to meticulous realism and tantalisingly delicate flower paintings. In a more contemporary sense, realism functions for him as it does for Duane Hanson's sculpture of a working-class hero, or Christopher Williams' portraits of Harvard's glass flowers, Tony Matelli's tiny weeds, or even John Peto's tacked ribbons and postcards. However, although it is Suda's realism which inspires a certain curiousity, it's a style which only ushers us to the threshold of meaning in his work.
In Suda's art theatricality swiftly undercuts realism, and the meaning of his work nests in that foreclosure. It is in the presentation of these lifelike sculptures - which transform modest twigs, commonplace leaves and commendable blossoms into artificial episodes - that stirs up a deep significance. Take, for instance, his three wooden carvings of the Magnolia plants coming to life, blossoming, and finally dying. The changing of the seasons portrayed here may recall Ch'ien Hsuan or Casper David Friedrich, but to read them as straightforward meditations on the delicate cycle of life underestimates the artist's aspiration. Perhaps to Western eyes, Suda's Japanese pedigree automatically registers his subject as 'contemplative', but it's a perception that would reduce the artist to a caricature and undervalue his ambition. Introspection is hardly Suda's subject - it's more about the dramatic moment.
You had to crawl through a low doorway in order to enter an alarmingly green room to see the spotlighted sculpture of a magnolia branch sporting red hot buds Magnolia Flower (2000). Here, life was interrupted so you could study the beauty arrested by art. In a second 'event' (and event is the right word), a long, narrow hallway led you to another flowering magnolia branch. Having a look was a solo affair; two people could fit in the hall but not comfortably. The blossom was presented before a translucent backdrop that covered the far end of the hall. You could see its exotic reflection through the wall, and if you were lucky, the shadow of a gallery visitor who has dropped by to inspect the wooden flower.
A third sculpture of the magnolia was placed behind a wall near the door of the gallery. Hurrying in and out, you could easily have missed this carving of a dead leaf and twig. For Suda, the beauty of life is a spectacle and a reverie, and often obscured by death, which appears out of nowhere as it always does.
Ronald Jones, published in Frieze, June-August 2000