Overview

Kenichi Suzuki works from Hanamaki, in Japan's Iwate Prefecture, drawing with ballpoint pens and erasable gel-ink pens to build compositions that sit between structure and dissolution. His practice moves between abstraction and figuration, drawing as much from Japanese folk crafts and toys as from the sculptors and painters of postwar Europe. Suzuki has passed fifty, and describes an attention to the ordinary that has only sharpened with time, a habit of noticing what once went unremarked.

Process and inspiration

Suzuki's visual world is wide and specific. He returns often to Japanese folk crafts and toys, the papier-mâché cats, tigers, dolls, and horses that carry a kind of unstudied honesty. From there his interests reach further outward: the horse sculptures of Marino Marini, the unfinished stone figures of Michelangelo, the freedom of Matisse's paper cut-outs. He listens closely to Japanese painters who move between figurative and abstract registers, among them Gyoji Nomiyama and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and to the Abstract Expressionists, Nicolas de Staël, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning. Music runs alongside all of it, heard across every genre without division. What draws these references together is Suzuki's interest in art that holds two states at once, the recognisable and the unresolved, the built and the coming-apart. "I treat the motif as an unfinished torso," he says of his working method, "leaving parts deliberately incomplete so the form reads as both structured and on the edge of collapse."

"Value can emerge from the unfinished and imperfect."

In Conversation with Suzuki: On Kenshō

What does Kenshō mean to you?

"Kenshō is the process of discovering one's own individuality in color and form through a relationship with the outer world, the motif. It is the moment when, through engaging with something outside myself, my own way of seeing takes shape."

Could you tell us about a moment of sudden insight or clarity that emerged for you?

"For me, moments of sudden insight happen every day. Most often they come in the middle of conversations and small exchanges with my family. They tend to be the simplest things, hardly worth writing down, the kind of truths that never change from one era to the next. Yet since passing the age of fifty, I find myself noticing these obvious, everyday things more and more, and I have come to feel how truly precious they are."

How do you think this concept could help us in our everyday lives?

"In daily life we often wait for things to be perfect or complete. Kenshō suggests that value can emerge from the unfinished and imperfect, and that much is completed by our own imagination and point of view. Embracing the charm of collapse can help us stay open, find individuality in ordinary things, and see incompleteness as room for creativity rather than a flaw."