Kozo Nishino is a leading figure in large-scale metal sculpture who has received international acclaim for his public art pieces. He creates enormous yet delicate sculptures using materials such as titanium, stainless steel and iron. Each of Nishino’s pieces possesses a surprisingly minute and skeletal steel wire structure, and moves with smooth motions, reacting to natural movements of the air much as if it were a living thing.
I want to create something that evokes air and wind.
I would like my sculptures to exist as expressions of the lives we humans live cradled this atmosphere.
Instead of converting the things I see and experience into signs and committing them to memory, I tend to let them stay in my mind as the images they are, in other words to perceive things sensuously.
If these things are substituted with words or letters, I feel that the original impressions rapidly weaken. I view my work in much the same way. There is no elaborate planning in advance. My way of creating is to persevere with experimentation and manual work, for example, by bending metal rods into various shapes to draw delicate curves.
I have always explored imprecise things that, while not clearly visible to the eye, without doubt exist. Like a spider’s web, for example, which appears for a moment in the sun’s rays and is revealed in silhouette by raindrops, even though it cannot be seen distinctly by itself. At the same time, I would like my works to also refer to our human lives, which are lapped in a great, universal “something”. Never cold, but always existing with humans. I consistently hope that my own body heat can communicate itself to the viewer.
Kozo Nishino
