Takeshi Yasura’s practice apprehends humans, living organisms, inanimate matter, and technology not along a vertical hierarchy but on a horizontal axis, taking as its subject the dynamics of matter as it circulates and transforms among them. Garden is a work composed of stacked bags containing recycled phosphorus generated through the sludge treatment process, topped with objects shaped from sludge incinerator ash. These materials have passed through the human body, flowed from the sewer into the treatment facility, and been reclaimed through processes of incineration and regeneration; much of it is repurposed as aggregate and other civil engineering materials, coming to support the very ground beneath human habitation in largely invisible ways. What the title Garden presents is a garden that lies prior to the distinction between the natural and the artificial—a site where human and nonhuman, the living and the non-living, are rendered materially contiguous, where the metabolism of the city itself comes into view.

Artist CV: https://tokyogendai.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/20260829_TakeshiYasura_cv_JPEN-1.pdf