Title「Gynandromorph・ジナンドモルフ」
Photo：Kenichi Asano
Collaboration：Kanaz Forest of Creation Museum

 

○Opening Reception & Talk Event

Date & Time: Saturday, October 3, 15:00–18:00

Talk: 15:30–16:30　“Architecture and Sculpture”

Guest: Hajime Tokura, Designer at VUILD

 

A talk with sculptor Hiroko Kubo and Hajime Tokura, a designer at VUILD.

Starting with digital fabrication in sculpture and architecture, they will exchange candid views on making: the relationship between designers and builders, individual and collective production, computers and the human brain, and machines and hands.

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The Mythology of Standard Lengths

 

“Six 25-millimeter square pipes, standard length, please.”
This is how I order steel from a supplier. The term “teijaku” (定尺) refers to standardized dimensions established to facilitate the efficient processing and distribution of industrial materials.

As I began working with various industrial materials as sculptural media, I became aware that every manufactured product has its predetermined dimensions. These standards, determined according to the capacities of the people, machines, and vehicles involved in manufacturing and transportation, are modules that symbolize a mass-production society.

By contrast, systems of measurement such as sun（寸）, shaku（尺）, and ken（間） in Japan, and inches, feet, and yards in the West, have been used since long before industrialization. All of them are forms of “body measure,” based on the length of parts of the human body, such as the finger or foot. Even today, they continue to be used in architecture and civil engineering as standards for creating spatial beauty and structural rationality.

There are moments when the blue windbreak netting surrounding a building site, the yellow netting around a garbage collection point, piles of deformed reinforcing steel bars, or blue tarpaulins covering rooftops—short-lived consumables designed solely for functionality and efficiency—appear to shine beautifully within rural and urban landscapes.

Just as humanity once found standards of beauty in nature and in the human body, I wanted to explore the possibilities of sculpture from the perspective of the scales and measures of contemporary society.

What will the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene leave behind in the strata of the Earth? How much longer will the prosperous civilization built upon petroleum and concrete continue? Listening from afar to the footsteps of the end of human history, all I can do for now is keep my hands moving.

 

Hiroko Kubo

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Toward the Hand Before Naming

 

In his Notes on Art, the poet Chūya Nakahara begins with these words: “It is enough if the hand you feel before uttering the word ‘hand’—before naming it as a ‘hand’—is deeply felt.”
Here, Nakahara expresses a stance that seeks to give form, through poetry—a form of art whose material is language—to a sensation that exists prior to words, before it is given a name. It was, ultimately, an extraordinarily difficult path. But what if Nakahara had been a sculptor? Or, if he had stood before Kubo’s sculptures, what might he have intuited, and what words might he have found to speak?

These are the sorts of things I have been idly contemplating in Yuda Onsen, Yamaguchi, Nakahara’s hometown. I arrived here yesterday by Shinkansen from Tokyo, passing through Hiroshima, Kubo’s hometown, along the way. And yet, traveling by Shinkansen, moving at such extraordinary speed, seems to distort one’s sense of the scale of space and time.

The word Kubo has chosen as the title and theme of this exhibition is Teijaku (定尺). It was unfamiliar to me, but I learned that it refers to the standardized dimensions and sizes used in architecture and industrial materials.
In the character shaku (尺), I seem to hear an echo of the language once used by craftsmen of earlier times.

Looking into the etymology of the character 尺, I found the following explanation: “A pictograph. The shape of a hand with the thumb and middle finger fully extended downward. The upper part represents the wrist, while the lower, 八-shaped part represents the two fingers spread apart.” Beneath this explanation is an illustration of a hand measuring a shaku with its fingers opened in a V-shape (from Shizuka Shirakawa, Jōyō Jikai).
In the statement accompanying this exhibition, Kubo refers to “the bodily scale.” From this, I am reminded of something: from antiquity to the present day, and across different regions of the world, however radically the outward signs of civilization may differ—whether in architectural forms or in the ways they have changed over time—the shape of the human hand that has made them has remained almost unchanged.

For each exhibition, Kubo conducts meticulous research into motifs that have accumulated and undergone variations throughout her career, as though tracing a spiral—motifs grounded in prehistoric art, ethnography, cultural anthropology, and other fields. She first takes this research in through words, through names and concepts, and digests it. Yet in the studio, she seems to move her hands beyond what can be conceived by the mind alone: thinking with her hands, and bringing into presence through form what the “hand before naming” deeply intuits.

(The drawing on the cover of Blue Sun, Green Moon seems to trace the process of this thinking hand as it reaches back toward a form that exists before naming. It fascinates me. It also brings to mind Giacometti’s drawings, though rather than Giacometti’s severity, it possesses a lightness and richness akin to the texture that might be called the signature of Kubo’s sculptures—a texture that allows wind and light to pass through.)

In her recent works, Kubo has also been experimenting with “borrowing the hands of people whose technical skills surpass her own in order to raise the quality of the work.”
Thus, the hands that connect the distant past to the present and the future—the hands of humanity—overlap with Kubo’s own hands, together with their accumulated techniques and acts of prayer, and now take form in an unknown sculptural space-time that exists before naming.

At that moment, the standardized materials of Teijaku are placed within the context of a new mythology—which is at the same time a mythology in itself, just as a great poem contains within it a poetics, and a great sculpture contains within it a theory of sculpture. They reveal to us an unknown scale, inviting us once again to measure art, and this society, this world, this universe… each with our own hands.

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Hiroko Kubo CV – 久保寛子

Born 1987 in Hiroshima. Lives and works in Chiba, Japan. She Graduated from Hiroshima City University, completed her MFA Sculpture at Texas Christian University.
Drawing on research into theories of prehistoric art, folk and indigenous art, and cultural anthropology, Kubo creates sculptural works using industrial materials such as wire mesh, agricultural sheets, and windbreak nets. Her practice explores themes such as the threat of nature, cycles of destruction and regeneration of relics, and representations of marginalized women. Through her work, Kubo invites contemporary reconsideration of the beauty embodied in idols shaped by myth and prayer, and in utilitarian objects rooted in daily life.

She received the Hiroshima Newcomer Award for Culture in 2022 and the Grand Prize in the Rokko Meets Art Competition in 2017. Her large-scale works are included in the collections of KAMU Kanazawa (Ishikawa), the Osaka-based Chishima Foundation for Creative Osaka, and IZAK Corporation (Toyama), among others. Since 2017, she has been managing the “Alternative Space CORE” in Hiroshima.

 

▪︎ Education
2013  MFA in Sculpture, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX
2009  BFA in Sculpture, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan

 

▪︎ Solo Exhibitions
2026  Kanaz Forest of Creation Museum, Fukui, Japan
2024  Steel framed Goddess, Pola Museum Annex, Tokyo, Japan
Steel  framed Goddess, Kanazawa Citizen’s Art Center, Ishikawa, Japan
2023  Street Amulets, Blind Alley Projects, Fort Worth, TX
2022  ISAAC, Loko Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2020  Wisdom of the Earth, Hirose Collection, Hiroshima, Japan
2020  Wisdom of the Earth, Yamaki Fine Art, Hyogo, Japan
2017  Goddess of Bricolage, Gallery G, Hiroshima, Japan
2013  Contemporary Agricultural Masks, Hiroshima Art Center, Hiroshima, Japan
2011  Historical Humans, Izumi Museum of Art, Hiroshima, Japan
2011  Human Acts, Art Space HAP, Hiroshima, Japan

 

▪︎ Selected Group Exhibitions
2025  Aichi Triennale: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Japan
2025  Ulterior Gallery at Feria Material vol.11, Mexico City, Mexico
2025  Outdoor Sculpture Viewing at Nanohana Festival, Irago Canola Garden, Aichi, Japan
2024  Art Site in Nagoya Castle, Nagoya Castle, Aichi, Japan
2024  Mori Art Night, Tokyo Midtown Galleria, Tokyo, Japan
2024  Igoku Tamaru: lives without boundaries, KINAN ART WEEK, Wakayama, Japan
2024  Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale 2024, Niigata, Japan
2024  Ulterior Gallery at NADA New York vol.10, New York, NY
2023  GO FOR KOGEI, Kansui Park, Toyama, Japan
2023  Romantic Route 3 Art Festival, Hakka Literary Garden, Taiwan
2022  TIDE: When Tide Becomes Form, Creative Center Osaka, Osaka, Japan
2022  Streaming Heritage, Nagoya Castle, Aichi, Japan
2022  Takamatsu Contemporary Art Annual vol.10: There Is No Boundaries Here, Takamatsu Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan
2021  Terrace Art, Terrace Mall Shonan, Kagawa, Japan
2020  Saitama Triennale 2020, Former Omiya Library, Saitama, Japan
2020  When the Canaries Stop Chirping, Alternative Space CORE at Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan
2019  AGROTOPIA: When life becomes art through local agriculture, The Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan
2019  Hakata Old Town Marugoto Museum, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan
2019  Rokko Meets Art 2019, Mt. Rokko, Hyogo, Japan
2018  SMART ILLUMINATION YOKOHAMA, Zou-no-Hana Terrace, Kanagawa
2018  Matsuri-Matsuru, Spiral Garden, Tokyo; Wacoal Study Hall Kyoto, Kyoto
2017  Rokko Meets Art 2017, Mt. Rokko, Hyogo, Japan
2016  OSOREISM, Hajimari Museum, Fukuoka, Japan
2016  Setouchi Triennial 2016, Shodo Island, Kagawa, Japan
2016  ENVIRONMENT, Frosinone Art Academy, Frosinone, Italy
2014  The Expanding Horizon an Exhibition of Japanese Contemporary Art, 53 Art Museum, Guangzhou, China
2013  Texas Biennial 2013, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
2013  The Best: MFA 2013, Red Arrow Contemporary, Dallas, TX
2012  MFA National Competition, First Street Gallery, New York, NY
2012  Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, TX; Hiroshima, Japan

 

▪︎ Collections
Kanaz Forest of Creation Art Museum
Kambara Kisen Co., Ltd.
LOKO GALLERY
Chishima Foundation for Creative Osaka
The Miyauchi Art Foundation
KAMU KANAZAWA
HIROSE COLLECTION
Hiroshima City University Art Museum

 

▪︎ Awards & Residencies
2025  Artist in Residency, Fundación Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, Mexico
2022  Cultural Newcomer Prize of Hiroshima City, Japan
2017  Grand Prize, Rokko Meets Art, Hyogo, Japan
2011-13  MFA Full Ride Scholarship, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX
2011-12  Hiroshima Scholarship, Hiroshima International Cultural Foundation, Hiroshima, Japan

 

Artist’s Website
https://hirokokubo.net/