Tetsuya Yamada: Listening

On January 18, the Walker Art Center will present Tetsuya Yamada: Listening, a solo exhibition of work from Twin Cities–based artist Tetsuya Yamada (b. Japan, 1968, lives and works in Minneapolis). The Walker presentation encompasses more than 20 years of work, foregrounding Yamada’s commitment to what he refers to as “the truth of material,” a concept that guides his interdisciplinary practice. Listening is the first comprehensive US museum exhibition to survey the artist’s expansive practice, featuring a range of more than 65 new and previous works.

Trained in ceramics—still the core of Yamada’s practice—the artist has expanded into a broad range of media including sculpture, video, drawing, painting, and installation. The gallery environment at the Walker is designed as a path along which one can explore the range of the artist’s materials and influences. Some works are made from ordinary, human items (bits of machinery, sawhorses, newspaper, plywood) or forms found in nature (branches, rocks, sand, living plants). Yamada places these materials in dialogue with his hand-built and thrown ceramic objects, delicate drawings, video works, and paintings drawn from mathematical systems.

“Tetsuya Yamada’s work shows how art can illuminate the poetry found in the everyday,” notes Walker senior curator Siri Engberg, who has organized the exhibition. “His sensibility comes from his intuitive use of materials and space, making him one of the most rigorous and interesting artists working in the Twin Cities right now.”

“Sometimes the behavior of materials, objects, space, and light becomes a metaphor or a voice speaking to me,” the artist notes. “The idea of Listening is well adapted to the creative process—listening to the process. The process might take me to places I didn’t imagine initially—this is the fundamental of studio practice for me.”

Exploring the shifting boundaries between art and life, Yamada draws inspiration from the ancient Japanese forms of Noh theater and the traditional tea ceremony; the modernism of Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi; the democracy to the found object espoused by Marcel Duchamp; and the commitment to the use of simple, elemental materials seen in the work of the artists of the Japanese Mono-ha and Italian Arte Povera movements of the 1960s. Within this is a sensibility that considers the urban environment as backdrop—the artist spent his youth as a skateboarder exploring the streets of Tokyo, listening to punk rock, and thinking about the landscape of the city as a site for artistic expression.

Works in the exhibition show Yamada’s consideration of ordinary objects or daily rituals as building blocks for larger expressions. His monumental sculpture Everyday City (2005), a work in the Walker’s collection, gathers more than 800 hand-thrown stoneware plates, cups, bowls, and other objects to form an imagined urban skyline. 9435E3628094, a video work from 2016, is named for the Twin Cities highways traveled in a circular route around the artist’s studio. 

Yamada, who has been a professor in the department of art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis since 2003, is also a 2023 recipient of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a fully-illustrated catalogue in association with Los Angeles–based Inventory Press. The artist has additionally worked with the Walker’s department of Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact to develop a range of programs that speak to his practice of working with community and public spaces.  

Curators: Siri Engberg, senior curator and director, Visual Arts; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts 

Exhibition sponsors: Tetsuya Yamada: Listening is made possible with generous support from Deborah and John Christakos, Michael J. Peterman and David A. Wilson, and RBC Wealth Management. The exhibition catalogue is supported by Paula Cooper, and the Japan Foundation, New York.