Shougo Abiru

He was born in 1961 in Tsushima City, Nagasaki Prefecture.
At the time of his birth, the island's population was about 70,000, and today it is 35,000.
There were no museums, and the countryside was virtually devoid of art.
In such an environment, only natural formations stimulated and nurtured my...

He was born in 1961 in Tsushima City, Nagasaki Prefecture.
At the time of his birth, the island's population was about 70,000, and today it is 35,000.
There were no museums, and the countryside was virtually devoid of art.
In such an environment, only natural formations stimulated and nurtured my sensibility.

When I was in junior high school, I had a good art teacher, and this gave me the desire to become a sculptor, albeit vaguely.

When I was in high school, although I had a yearning for art, I chose science and mathematics and managed to enter the engineering department of a local national university.

After entering university, I began to visit art museums more often and decided to drop out of college because my longing to become a sculptor, which had sprouted when I was in junior high school, grew too great and took my mind off the engineering field.
After that, there was a period of hesitation, but I was able to enter the sculpture department of Tokyo University of the Arts at the age of 26 while working part-time.
During my university years, I mainly used metal as my main material, but there was a subtle discomfort between what I wanted to express and the texture of the material, and I had a vague feeling that I was not quite right.

I had a feeling that glass was close to the spatial expression I was looking for, so I decided to study glass as well, partly to reopen my mind to the fact that I had started art late.

After I started working with glass, I no longer felt a gap in the sense of materiality, but I ran into a big wall in terms of size. It had never occurred to me when I was working with metal, but the larger the glass, the more difficult it became to produce.
To solve the size problem, I managed to develop an original technique after much hard work.
All of my works are built on the foundation of such techniques.