Solo Exhibition — 聳え立つ糞  / galleryTOH

Curated by Yuu Takagi

In today’s so-called era of environmental crisis, the reexamination of the relationship between “nature” and humanity has become a dominant cultural current. Yet what we assume to be a shared understanding of “nature” is, in truth, deeply individual.

Consider a visitor walking through a carefully landscaped park or a neatly arranged row of trees in the city, proclaiming, “What beautiful nature.” Such moments provoke a deeper inquiry: is “nature” the presence of plants? The park itself? Or the human desire to find the natural within the constructed?

For artist Takeshi Yasura, the environment he engages with is one saturated with the artificial. His work proposes that the infrastructures, machines, and technological systems that support our cities—largely unnoticed—can themselves be regarded as forms of nature. Rather than a dichotomy, “nature” and “artifice” are layered, inseparable.

Yasura also asserts a brutally honest view of the human condition. He equates the supposedly exalted human figure with excrement—not out of disdain, but out of clarity. The exhibition title, We Didn’t Know They Stacked Shit That High, is borrowed from a film in which one soldier berates another with grotesque humor. In Yasura’s hands, the line becomes a metaphor for the absurd accumulations of civilization: its waste, its delusions, and its contradictions.

By holding a mirror to these structures, this exhibition asks: what surrounds us, and what are we complicit in stacking higher than we ever imagined?

Engineer: Saito Yusuke
Photo: Naoki Takehisa