Yutaka Sone
Parasol Unit, London, UK
Yutaka Sone creates dense totalities in his sculpture and installations. Traversing the twinned extremities of the mountain and the jungle, Sone locates purity in the most unlikely places: in the toy architecture of a commercial ski resort (Ski Lift, 2004 - 5) and in urban mass planning (Hong Kong Island (Chinese), 1998). Suffused with wonder, Sone’s work spins a series of tautly contained worlds.
His current exhibition at Parasol Unit showcases marble and crystal sculptures, large-scale live plant installations, and small-scale paintings, capturing the idiosyncratic diversity of feeling that characterizes Sone’s work. The Japanese artist veers wildly between the immaculately produced, as in his marble sculpture, to the seemingly naïve, as in his paintings. That inconsistency is one of the more gently puzzling aspects of his work; nonetheless, the exhibition coheres through Sone’s enduring preoccupation with man in nature.
Sone is rightly celebrated for his feel for nature, but what is most distinct in Sone’s work is his refusal of the dialectic between the manmade and the natural. There is no clear distinction of either ethical or philosophical assessment in Sone’s approach to physical structures ranging from the natural and the minute, as in his well-known snowflake series, ‘Every Snowflake has a Different Shape’ (2005-2007), to the artificial and the large-scale Giant Snow Leopard (2004).
Certainly Sone is interested in the language and narrative of utopia; islands are a recurring theme in his work, and nearly all of his sculpture takes formal cues from the massing of land. But Sone seeks out utopias of feeling and mood, rather than those of pure idea; by communicating intensities of experience rather than concrete philosophical ideas, Sone creates work that is haunting and absorbing, for reasons that are often difficult to identify.
Sone is most interested in examining the quality of experience that is played out against various natural and unnatural backdrops - this is what makes his work so perfectly distinct, despite the familiarity of its thematising of the utopian. While his work explores ideas of solitude in nature, its stress is on the nature of the experience engendered by that solitude - and recalls that utopia is, after all, a man-made notion. Sone’s utopia ranges from uninhabited jungle islands to mountain top leisure communities, and emphasizes that even solitude is a variable term.
Katie Kitamura
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