In the late 1960s, Kishio Suga began to produce and exhibit his work as a member of the artistic group Mono-ha, which was formed and developed in Tokyo between 1969 and 1972. Suga, a key figure in Japanese contemporary art, is the only member of Mono-ha to have consistently developed the group’s research and practices through the present day, pushing the boundaries of its original concepts and themes. Taking temporary arrangements and combinations of natural and industrial materials as his starting point, Suga investigates their physical presence, existence and relationship with the environment by building site-specific installations. His princi - pal themes are the relationships between the individual and materials, which he further explores using direct, live actions, inserting new materials and altering them in front of an audi - ence and thereby revealing new meanings and unexpected aspects, which Suga refers to as “activations.” Suga’s work — and that of Mono-ha in general — was set against a background of feverish international experimentation. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it shared a great deal formally and thematically with contemporary movements such as Post-Minimalism and Land Art in the USA, and Arte Povera in Italy, parallels that are indicative of Mono-ha’s importance.