The two sculptors, Shiro Matsui and Takeshi Hayashi, have created their works through the layering of dialogues with free thoughts, as if “doodling” on space and time. By arranging these pieces along the OAP Sculpture Path, they bring to mind the different phenomena and actions associated with water as if responding to the Okawa River flowing in the background of the path, along with the natural features and history of the aqua metropolis of Osaka, making an expanded world of sculpture appear.

Outdoor sculptures are in places that are connected to our daily lives. One of their appealing attributes is how they show us things that make us notice what is usually overlooked. The theme of “doodling” in this exhibition points to primitive and ambiguous sculptural forms that seem to elude specific meaning, like the traces left by children playing in a sandbox at a park. The artists deal with materials that are used by people even if they are not sculptors, such as earth, water and plants, and are also conscious of using simple actions in their production. This may be seen as slightly different from what is generally thought of as sculpture. However, rather than something called a sculpture, a space like no other is created through the involvement of the material, environment and viewer. Moreover, these sculptures can be likened to concrete things, even with their abstract appearances. In this sense, the “doodle” may be a way of art making that transforms the objects or behaviors found in daily life into sculptures. The shapes and spaces born from this method bring discovery, and also familiarity, to the viewer. Through these sculptures that accept their surroundings’ effects of weather, plants and animals, and engage the gazes, bodies and imaginations of the people who come and go, we hope that you will be able to reaffirm the interesting aspects of this location that had become unseen, buried within the everyday.

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[ About the artists ]

Takeshi Hayashi is a sculptor, who creates abstract sculptures using a variety of stone materials, and by arranging them into a composition, produces an expressive representation of space itself, or what could be called a “landscape”. His works include collections of carved stone that evoke images of rice paddies or distant mountain ranges unfolding before your eyes, pieces where viewers tread across stratified stone sculptures, as well as installations of stone pillars that stand like a grove across an entire exhibition space, filling every nook with a comfortable tension. Hayashi has exhibited numerous indoor and outdoor artworks that, while melding with the environment of their surroundings, also give off a beautiful and supple presence by building up a dialogue with the true nature of stone through the relationship between place and body, or the experiences and images stored within the self. He has also held tea ceremonies atop his work made of marble as large as four and a half tatami mats, the standard size of a Japanese tea room, and has used materials besides stone including ceramics, roof tiles, wall clay, and washi paper, creating works inspired by uniquely Japanese natural features and memories of the lands.

Shiro Matsui, an artist deeply interested in the relationship between human perception and space/time, has been presenting concepts of space-time full of fresh and unexpected, using a wide range of materials such as wood, metal, silicon rubber. From copper ducts with ends that open up like funnels that stretch from place to place to transmit voices across spaces separated by walls or distance, to giant balloon-like works that fuse with the buildings in which they are installed, allowing the viewer to simultaneously experience the interior and exterior of the space, Matsui’s expression has developed in a diverse array of forms and scales. His work shakes up and disrupts our understanding of things that we usually take for granted by freely connecting, severing, and inverting the realms of in/out, here/there, and present/past through the viewer’s visual and physical experiences, pushing open new dimensions. In recent years, Matsui has expanded his focus to our relationship with the universe, starting with a collaboration with JAXA, and has held workshops all across the world to allow people to experience the “universe” here on Earth more physically by holding the vacuum of outer space captured by astronauts in a sealed container, which is just one of the cross-disciplinary endeavors he has taken on.