Unburdening his artistic practise from the weight of art history – its models and prototypes - Shotaro Yoshino arranges with long wooden sheaves of wood, elaborating a space in the trees below the Welcome Center.  In a way Shotaro is removing the object-ness and the subject-ness from his integrative sculpture. When Mono Ha’s Nobuo Sekine made Phase Mother Earth a cylinder of earth removed from the ground and placed adjacent to the empty space that resulted, there was a sense of moving on from history, of achieving an object that would challenge traditional sculpture… And yet there lingered a sense of object-ness in the Mono Ha’s actions, sculptures, for their movement was as much a reaction to the post-War sensibility, as an affirmation of new forms of art in Japan. Shotaro Yoshino has produced a work at Mount Tsukuba residency that no longer has to present a presence of ego, but instead draws in space using a series of textured boards without the confines of a conception, or forethought as to what he will produce. The freedom of this gestural sculptor’s action, is that he is achieving a state of reflection on materiality, on the matter he works with and through. The action is temporal, ephemeral like a sketch. If it has monumentality it is in the simplicity of its gestures.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　John K. Grande