Ryoko Aoki exemplifies the tendency among younger Japanese artists to invent an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary by transforming everyday objects and exploring the work of perception through simple childlike actions. Aoki’s main medium is drawing. She accumulates fragments of images from sources such as advertisements, children’s encyclopedias, and fabric designs, creating unique pictures in which far-fetched things are connected through the metonymical associations that condense or displace details. Her neutral lines encourage these associative links: Long trajectories trace contours and connect

Kishio Suga is a representative artist of Mono-ha, the Japanese avant-garde movement of the late ’60s and the ’70s, which presented sculpture as a unique object or “thing” that alters spectators’ perceptions rather than as an aesthetic object. Using everyday and industrial materials, and constructing objects with a minimum show of technique, Mono-ha shared its formal and conceptual goals with Minimalism and arte povera. Suga, in particular, emphasized the importance of the relation between created objects and the surrounding space, as well as the mutual impingement of things placed in relation