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a wooden sculpture of a foot with holes on ita wooden foot with holes in it on a white surfacea wooden foot that has been carved into the shape of a shoea small stuffed animal that is sitting on the groundan image of a wooden foot with a hole in the middlea brown shoe with a hole in it on a white surfacean image of a wooden shoe with holes cut out of it
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15 - Ryō Matsumoto 松本涼 (born 1969, Tokyo)
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Estimate €12,000 - €15,000
Sale commission
Description
Ryō Matsumoto 松本涼 (born 1969, Tokyo) Kyōjitsu hiniku – Shinsen – Ashi 虚実皮膜 神饌 足 Between Reality and Illusion – Sacred Offering – Foot 2016 Camphor wood (kusu, Cinnamomum camphora) H11.5 W9.5 D23.5 cm Scaled to the size of a real human foot, this sculpture is part of Ryō Matsumoto’s Kyōjitsu hiniku – Shinsen series. The artist begins with a block of camphor wood, which he hollows out with extreme virtuosity until only a shell remains, sometimes less than a millimetre thick. The form appears solid whilst being almost entirely hollow: all that remains of the body is a skin of wood. The title Kyōjitsu hiniku, borrowed from the aesthetic theory of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, refers to the fine line between reality and fiction where the truth of art is said to lie. Here, Matsumoto gives this idea a striking material form. Anatomically recognisable yet devoid of flesh and mass, the foot exists somewhere between presence and absence, body and shell, life and disappearance. The countless lines running across its surface replicate the movement of the wood’s grain and growth rings, symbolically superimposing human anatomy upon the memory of the tree. The gaps, cracks and tears in this extremely fragile skin form an integral part of the work. By deliberately pushing the material to the limits of its resilience, Matsumoto accepts that it will transform, crack and continue to age. The sculpture is therefore not conceived as an immutable form, but as a material engaged in a continuous process of disappearance. The term Shinsen 神饌 refers to offerings made to the deities in the Shintō tradition. By conferring this status upon a fragment of the human body, Matsumoto transforms the foot into a strange, contemporary offering. Beneath the apparent display of virtuosity thus lies a profoundly Japanese meditation on impermanence, the boundary between the visible and the invisible, and the very precariousness of all existence.
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About the sale Art Animation VII: Monsters, Villains and Antagonists
Auction location
Auction time 10/18/2026 at 3:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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