NITO Kento

Born 1986 in Saitama
Based in Saitama

Nito is a sculptor who thrives on the immediacy of contact. Initially, he explored relationships between materials and the axis of time, in other words in the processes of modeling materials or replacing one with another, but he switched to an approach that radically truncates both distance and time: he has employed his own body as a rag used to wipe the surfaces of the city streets, buried his entire body in the ground (connecting with the earth), buried himself except for a hand emerging from the earth (connecting with the universe), and slammed his body into material, naked, while using the material to fashion a parabolic sculpture. All of these actions constitute intense collisions, or direct communion, between the body and the world around it. While passionately dedicated to the genre of sculpture, Nito also intentionally shatters it. Can the strain these practices imposes on the body be transmuted into redemption in the ego-shattering moment of contact and psychological liberation from gravity? How is the viewer intended to relate to these acts of communion? Nito’s sculpture poses these and other profound questions.