Dossier - Suchan Kinoshita
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Suchan Kinoshita
1960, Tokyo - Maastricht

Suchan Kinoshita grew up in Japan, and emigrated when she was twenty to Cologne, Germany, to study music at the institute where the contemporary composer Maurizio Kagel taught. Later, she worked for a theatre company, in which the members alternated between the roles of actor, set builder and director. She ended up in Maastricht through the post-academic Jan van Eyck course, which is situated there. It is therefore no coincidence that her work moves across many borderlines; inside and outside museum walls, with or without an active contribution from the public, recognisable as a work of art or camouflaged.
Kinoshita is interested in the effect that a staged space has on the public. It is not without reason that a large part of her oeuvre consists of houses and sheds. In ‘Hok I’ (1996), visitors can shut themselves away in the temporary shelter built of driftwood and imagine themselves alone for a while with a series of hand-blown hourglasses scattered on a table top. The hourglasses vary in shape and size and are filled with different substances, such as honey, ink and shampoo. It is as if the shed is a time capsule, in which time appears to have various speeds, similar to the way in which our subjective view of time rarely corresponds to the time on the clock. In ‘Untitled’ (2000), a Japanese pavilion made of balsa wood and rice paper, there are also many references to the passage of time. It also blurs the boundaries of the work of art and the museum space and our cliché-based notions of East and West.
The museum also has a seven-part sculpture entitled ‘Iso-Follies’, (2006). For these seven irregularly shaped balls, Kinoshita gathered old clothes and other ‘rubbish’ from her atelier and the home of Nadja Vilenne, the owner of her Liège gallery.
Iso-follies, 2006

Images
Collection Bonnefantenmuseum
Iso-follies, 2006
Hok I, 1996
Zonder titel, 2000