Tetsuya Yamada draws on skateboarding, punk rock, Japanese tea ceremony for Walker Art Center show

Yamada moved to Minneapolis more than 20 years ago and is a professor at the University of Minnesota.

By Alicia Eler Star Tribune

January 25, 2024 — 6:05am

Inside a gallery at the Walker Art Center, there's a wooden cedar bench with three deep brown cushions resting on top of it. Sit down and you'll discover that the "cushions," however, are made of clay, not fabric and feathers.

This sort of visual dissonance is a hallmark of Tokyo-born, Minneapolis-based artist Tetsuya Yamada, who works primarily in ceramics. A professor of art at the University of Minnesota since 2003, he is as inspired by the Japanese tea ceremony as he is punk aesthetics. He's mounted pop-up shows in abandoned buildings, had solo shows at pristine white-walled galleries and has received a Guggenheim and two McKnight Artist Fellowships.

"Listening" at the Walker is the artist's first comprehensive museum exhibition, including more than 65 new and old works, with the earliest from 2001.

"One of the through lines running through the exhibition is that very fine line between art and the idea of the every day," said Walker Art Center Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts Siri Engberg, who considers Yamada a conceptual artist.

It makes sense, then, that one of the earliest works in the show, titled "Cup Exchange," 2003/2024, is simply a row of white diner-style coffee mugs. Yamada first exhibited this in 2003 at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where he worked. He made a DIY-style poster telling people to just come with their own mug and trade with one of his. A re-creation of the exchange occurs on Feb. 15.

The inspiration for this piece came out of a residency he did at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, where artists-in-residence work at the Kohler Co. factory in Sheboygan, Wis. Yamada was inspired by the workers and adopted their rigorous work schedule, including its physical requirements.

"He was extremely interested in this idea of the routine of the factory, punching in and working on the line, learning the idea of production, creating multiple versions of the same thing," Engberg said.

That idea of the multiple, a hallmark of Marcel Duchamp's famous 1917 work "Fountain," a ready-made men's urinal, gets a nod in Tetsuya's show through his piece "Mr. and Mrs. Duchamp," 2004.

His pandemic-inspired art is in the show, such as an arrangement of glass shards that he found when digging in his backyard during lockdown. He arranged the shards to spell out the word "INVISIBLE."

The presence of the human hand in the work is important to Yamada; for his piece "Untitled" 2012, a white canvas with intersecting squiggly gray lines, Engberg asked if he wanted it to be cleaned and he declined.

Hometown favorite

When Yamada first came to Minneapolis in 2003 for a job at the University of Minnesota. He arrived in America in 1994 for a post-baccalaureate program and then stayed for a master of fine art's degree program at Alfred University, graduating in 1997. He exhibits nationally and internationally, from South Korea to Philadelphia.

During a public conversation with Engberg on the evening of Jan. 18, before the public opening, Yamada said that he had a better relationship with his home country from a distance.

"It's kind of a big baggage to talk about, but it probably has to do with the social structure [in Japan]," he said. "But there are really positive parts about it, too — how much people care about others."

Yamada, 56, lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Renee, and their two young children Risa, 10, and Rie, 8, who were all there that evening.

Ryan Fontaine and Kristin Van Loon of Hair + Nails Gallery, and Megan McCready and John Rasmussen of Midway Contemporary Art, all know Yamada well.

Yamada's 2021 show "Coping" at Hair + Nails was inspired by his teen years skateboarding in Tokyo; he built a mini-skatepark in the gallery.

For his 2022 show "Shallow River" at Midway Contemporary Art, the works were more abstract and staggered throughout the broad space. A hanging cone that looked like bronze was actually clay, and those two seeming "cushions" were also there, but they were on the floor, rather than a bench. (These are in the Walker show, too.)

"I think there's an adherence to perfection, a sort of craftsmanship, but it's rare to find an artist working at that level locally — it just kinda blew us away," Fontaine said. "Once we started talking with him, I realized that his background was in skateboarding and punk rock, and I could relate to that."