Susumu Shingu is an artist who is extremely sensitive to nature and perceives the endless potential of its variations, which probably explains for the delightful freshness of his work, its surprising capacity to renew itself. The wind is there, always, everywhere. It is an invisible movement of atmosphere; but, following its own whim, it leaves its mark. It rises, it falls, elusive and versatile. However, without anything to push against, the wind remains abstract. Susumu Shingu’s sculptures materialize it without merely reducing it to the role of supplying power. The blowing wind plays with the elements as it pleases, and modifies them constantly. An inert body stirs, it is injected with life and soul, and one thinks, for example, of the shots of Yasujirô Ozu’s films, in which colorful clothes hung on a line rise discreetly with the breeze. Time is suspended in space; it does not flow, but repeats itself. This endless succession of moments is like a series of fleeting poems that convince us of the cyclical nature of the living world and its eternal rebirth — that is what Susumu Shingu’s works reveal to us.

Marie-Noëlle Farcy and Clément Minighetti, excerpt from the catalogue for the exhibitions Spaceship and Cosmos, May 2018

From May 15 to July 21, 2018, the gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of the Japanese artist Susumu Shingu, entitled COSMOS, in an echo of the important retrospective Spaceship that the Mudam Luxembourg—Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean has dedicated to his work from May 18, 2018 to January 6, 2019. This exhibition has been presented in three Japanese museums, and will now be seen for the first time in Europe. It will present, among other works, Wind Caravan, an ensemble of twenty-one sculptures animated by the wind, in the Dräi Eechelen Park.

Following from his preceding exhibitions at the gallery, Sculptures du respir in 2006, Planet of Wind and Water in 2009, and Beyond Time in 2012, COSMOS assembles a selection of the artist’s sculptures from 2006 to 2017, as well as recent collages and paintings, and some of his most exceptional sculptural studies.

Sculptor of wind, water, and gravity, Susumu Shingu has regularly collaborated with the greatest talents of his era, such as Renzo Piano, Tadao Ando, Issey Miyake, and Jiři Kilián. Throughout the years, he has refined the materials of his sculptures, favoring high-tech materials that grasp the smallest breeze… to create works in harmony with the secret rhythms of our planet. The art of Susumu Shingu could not exist without wind. His elegant sculptures are animated by the smallest movement of the air, and reveal the intangible but omnipresent existence of breath. This “atmospheric” material, which he makes visible and sculpts, underlines his relationship with the world, his ecological consciousness. His entire oeuvre is undergirded by his harmonious research into the rhythms and infinite vibrations of nature, and by a force that is most fundamental to our planet — gravity. Without gravity, Susumu’s sculptures cannot blossom, as they are inseparable from their movement. After having travelled throughout the world with his sculptures, Susumu Shingu recently created his Museum of the Wind with 12 water and wind sculptures in the Arimafuji Park near Osaka, Japan. Currently, his energy is entirely dedicated to the great work of his life, Breathing Earth, the dream of a society living off of the planet’s natural energies.

Saturday, May 26, 4.30pm: exclusive meeting with the artist at the gallery in the Marais, under the auspices of the Paris Gallery Week-End.

The artist will sign his last three books, published by Gallimard Jeunesse in March 2018: Avec le soleil, Le voyage du vent, and La fraise.

The exhibition Cosmos is part of the associated program Japonismes 2018.