Yutaka Sone
The work of the Japanese artist Yutuka Sone (b. 1965) attempts to express a universal unity that brings together cultures and continents. The artist lives alternately in Los Angeles (USA), Chongwu (China) Michoacán (Mexico) and recently also in Antwerp, as if attempting, in this way, to unite the cultural divergence of different locations in unique but universally recognisable images. Sone studied architecture and visual arts at the University of Tokyo. Since then he brings together his fascination with both natural and architectural sites in organic, silent objects. The museum installations he composes are artisanal arrangements of the earthly reality, executed in organic materials, and often flanked by thematically related paintings. With his sculpture, Sone plays with enlargements of the almost invisible (such as ice crystals), and reductions of the imposing (such as landscapes, islands or snow-covered hills). Whatever he turns his gaze his onto, every visual impression is carefully sculpted out of blocks of marble or natural crystal. Sone is a traditional stonemason in the modern sense of the word. With the precision of a 3D printer, he carves the topography of Manhattan out of an impressive piece of stone. The skyline of skyscrapers – intersected by symmetrical street patterns – is dizzying, just like the light rays in the tree sculptures on a makeshift mountain slope – also made of marble.
Text: Hans Willemse
Translations: Michael Meert