For more than 20 years, Agematsu has made one miniature sculpture every day, comprised of various bits of debris and waste that have caught his eye in the streets of New York. The identical cellophane wrappers of cigarette packs that he uses as tiny display cases contain fragments of the landscape of New York, and are reminiscent of the tradition of miniature art in its aesthetic. The exhibition at the CAC displays sculptures made during May 2014.
“I am old. The planet is old. And there’s no way to get rid of all this plastic. And we’re shooting the shit into space. I used to want to go to space. For what? To see all this garbage floating by”, the artist once said in an interview. Yuji Agematsu was born in 1956 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, but has been living in Brooklyn, New York since 1980. In his youth, the artist studied with Tokio Hasegawa, the founder of the band Taj Mahal Travellers, and the jazz percussionist and choreographer Milford Graves.
