“Unknown game series” is an exhibition of works resulting from Mie Kongo’s ongoing search for diversity in sculptural materials and processes. Although the core of her research has been in ceramics, she experimentally engages in mixing materials and processes to discover the unexpected. While investigating sculptural relationships of volume, proportion, surface, color, balance, and tension, she contemplates the notion of natural balance, the unification of opposites and the interdependence of all things.
Employing systems, order, randomness, and chance in creating her compositions, Mie utilizes a range of materials as diverse as porcelain, wool felt, and found furniture, to construct “building blocks” that she assembles into geometric abstract compositions resembling the early stages of an architectural model or primordial architectonic structures. She looks for coincidences/bumps between the elements that create meaningful impact or relations, waiting for the moment when the work appears to have become a self-contained unit of meaning that is open to multiple interpretations. While precisely designed and carefully crafted, there is also a feeling of casual playfulness in her work “To play” and “be playful” are, for her, serious activities.
