Kan Yasuda, Sculpting Silence
Kan Yasuda, Deep Impact Gate, Northern Horse Park, 2023 | Courtesy © Kan Yasuda
Ten sculptures stand like islands scattered across a landscape of light and silence. At the Wilmotte Foundation, from 9 May to 22 November, Kan Yasuda presents Islands of Silence, a Collateral Event of the 2026 Venice Art Biennale curated by Jean-Michel Wilmotte. Marble lies at the heart of the exhibition. The Japanese sculptor, who has also worked in Pietrasanta for many years, transforms it through oval and circular forms, openings and cavities. The stone retains its physical weight yet seems to lose its rigidity, while grazing light continuously alters its appearance. The ten works emerge from the dimly lit gallery like elements of a mineral garden, separated by intervals that become an integral part of the installation. This is where the Japanese concept of Ma - the interval, distance or space between things - comes into play. In Yasuda's sculptures, emptiness is not an absence but an active element, creating relationships between fullness and void, hardness and softness, form and non-form. Introduced by Beyond Form, a video exploring the artist's marble-working process, the exhibition creates an essential environment in which matter, light and space carry equal weight. In a Biennale inevitably filled with images and constant visual stimulation, Yasuda chooses subtraction, allowing silence itself to shape the space.