Among the most memorable contributions to the inaugural Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1993, Shigeo Toya’s Woods III 1991–92 became one of the first large-scale installations to enter the Queensland Art Gallery collection. Consisting of 30 squared-off tree trunks elaborately carved with a chainsaw and arranged in an orderly open grid, the work is celebrated for its formal beauty as well as its poetic and philosophical allusions.

The presentation ‘Inscriptions and Excavations’ seeks to draw out ideas of inscription and excavation in Toya’s practice by placing Woods III in dialogue with selected holdings from QAGOMA’s extensive collection of contemporary Japanese art.

For Toya, the recesses and crevices created by his chainsaw laid bare the internal material qualities of the wood. The act of carving is at once an inscription — evidence of the artist’s intervention through writing or mark-making — and an excavation, removing accumulated layers to reveal what they might conceal. The archaeological sensibility of excavation extends to the gridded arrangement of the trunks in Woods III. While their spacing and materiality recall the experience of walking through a copse of trees — as the work’s title suggests — their geometrical placement directly references the ancient streets of Pompeii, whose ruins were preserved beneath the ash in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

The accompanying selection of works responds to Toya’s approach to mark-making and giving form to the invisible. Including works by Lee Ufan, Tokihiro Sato, Yoko Asakai and Yuta Nakamura, this Collection display expands on these themes as they relate to creativity, time, and the natural and constructed world, while preserving the sense of stillness at the installation’s heart.

‘Woods III: Inscriptions and Excavations’ is on display in QAG’s Gallery 14 from 2 March to 27 January 2025.

Feature image: Shigeo Toya’s Woods III 1991–92, installed for ‘Inscriptions and Excavations’, GOMA, March 2024 / © Shigeo Toya / Photograph: C Callistemon, QAGOMA