Sublimation is a chemical process that occurs when a solid becomes a vapor under extreme heat. True to its name, walking into Shoichi Seino’s solo show at Don Soker Contemporary Art will make you feel as though something extremely flammable and fragile has just burned up, too quickly for you to see it. It will snatch your breath away.
Sublimating is the work of a master minimalist. Seino has been practicing for decades, and his inclination toward site-specific installation is apparent, although this show was not conceived as such. There are only fourteen pieces total: two sets of small, wobbly black pillars placed on low, wooden pedestals and ten wall pieces, most of which hang on the same wall. None of the pieces are particularly large. The work could easily have been lost in the vastness of Soker’s new space — a recently gutted series of office suites — but instead the art controls its surroundings, forcing you to see its echoes in the traces left by the gallery’s recent occupants. Next to Seino’s works, a leftover stripe of paint along the wall or even the drag marks of furniture across the floor take on significance.
From a distance, the wall pieces — simply titled “Works 1 – 10” — look like paintings. Daubs of neutral colors like beige, slate grey, cream, rust, and taupe float against gridded backgrounds. The illusion of flat canvases covered with paint breaks down as you approach, however. Each work is made up of a grid of industrial ceramic filters that Seino has treated with various glazes and re-fired. Up close, they are shockingly organic and infinitely deep: feathery, with the texture of coral.
