Kishio Suga

The peak of awareness

You taught for a long time at Tama Art University, so you must be used to lecturing.

I'm not used to lecturing and I've forgotten everything about Tama Art University. I don't want to remember it. Teaching isn't good for an artist. Your creative spirit gets ground down, worn away. Artists who wind up as teachers in a place like that lose everything in the end.

Do you mean that you exhaust your creativity through speech?

That's right, it gets used up. That's the nature of creativity. Your words and your best intentions aren't going to make something into art. You have to approach art as nothing but the real thing.
In other words, in your everyday life you have to orient the routine world around you towards art. You need to look at things in a creative way. What exactly does this mean and how does one go about internalizing it? As an artist, you have to build up a penchant for abstraction. Everything around you contains a germ of creativity, doesn't it? You just have to find it. In the same way that we are possessed of a consciousness, things have a spiritual center, an inner strength and structure. That is to say, a latent potential. And you have to be able to detect this potential. To be able to actualize it. If you can't steer your consciousness in this direction, you'll have difficulty seeing things as they are. You can't bring creativity to bear upon a thing unless you place that thing at the peak of your awareness. This time, I decided to see how much latency I could bring to the surface. And since the interior is connected with the exterior, I had to consider the outward appearance of the thing, how it will be perceived. You go from outside to inside.

Is this sensation of a constant level of awareness present both when you are working and when you are away from work?

It continues whether I'm asleep or awake. Of course, I do think of superfluous things?“I like this person,”“What do I want to eat?” etc.? but I think it's important to always try to maintain this creative awareness. Out of awareness arises a kind of language or mode of communication. I become aware of the disparity between the conventional way of seeing the thing and my new vision of it. Then I have to decide how I want to realize that disparity, how I want it to look.
So, I develop a creative system to solve this issue. I’ll carve here and paint there; the activity takes on a physical dimension. By this point, I have a dialogue with the thing and have developed a feeling for its inner workings. I find myself moving from my initial idea to a more haptic understanding. I start to use all five senses to determine how I want the thing to feel, how I want it to look. I doubt I’m the only artist who goes through this process.