H. Nell Shiina
Working between Paris and Kyoto, and grounded in the plural cultural matrices of the United Kingdom and Japan, Nell Shiina pursues a practice-based investigation centred on sculpture.
His early education, which integrated fine art and anatomy alongside physics and Western philosophy, constitutes the theoretical foundation through which his practice reconsiders the interrelation of body, matter, and being.
While Shiina’s work departs from anatomical knowledge—understood as a structural comprehension of the body—it resists reduction to biological description. Instead, it extends into the domains of ontological visibility and phenomenal manifestation.
Here, the body is not conceived as a fixed entity but as an evental field, continuously reconfigured through acts of perception.
Shiina’s central concern lies in rethinking classical metaphysical themes—such as existence and essence—as self-referential networks of relations. Objects are not autonomous substances but emerge as the conditions of one another’s appearance. This relational ontological perspective underpins his practice.
His works function as dispositifs that open a space in which perception and being intersect as reciprocal conditions of their own becoming.
Dry lacquer sculpture articulates this position with particular clarity. As a technique marked by strong temporality, dry lacquer preserves within its internal structure the very process by which matter receives form, becomes hollowed, and nonetheless persists as an autonomous configuration.
The viewer’s gaze here operates not as detached observation but as a catalyst that destabilises binary distinctions—interior and exterior, plenitude and void, matter and essence—reconstituting them as reversible and mutually permeable relations.
Shiina’s sculptures do not seek merely to impose form upon material. Rather, they arise as responses to a fundamental question: how does being open itself to perception, and how does perception, in turn, retroactively constitute the conditions of being?
Through this practice, sculpture is redefined as a site for philosophical inquiry into the co-generative relations between matter, body, perception, and world.