YASUYUKI NISHIO (JAPAN, B. 1967)

Yasuyuki Nishio is an award-wining sculptor who completed his sculpture degree from Musashino Art University in 1990. Regressing back to Nishio's trajectory, the artist was thrilled to hear about a rumour that the Minsk, a Soviet Union warship, was stopping by the North Sea of Japan. With this wistful memory, Nishio created the phantom of Minsk (Lot 154), mummifying it in exquisite details, preserving his supernatural fantasy of Minsk from the past. Nishio skilfully moulds waves of exquisite forms in ardent diligence with precision and regularity. Indicating Minsk as an archaic commodity, the organic configuration of the sculpture impersonates a form of algae biologically invading surfaces of deserted industrial materials, signifying the lengthy measure of time.

Exploiting the procedure of negative casting, Nishio works from the inside out, in superimposed composition or as quoted by the artist 'a foetus insisting on its existence to the world outside the womb'; echoing his working concept with its outcome in producing an enthralling visual honesty of Nishio's inner nature. Minsk shifts identification as both sculpture and installation, visceral and intellectual, object and image and life and death. Layered with hybrid intricacy of negative and the positive, Minsk with its majestic posture and meticulous embellishment not only visually stimulate with mystical enchantment but also internally stimulate the psyche into finely tuned consciousness of what it means to be alive within the larger ecology of living things.