Seino sculpture at Soker: Next door to Huffman's show, Japanese sculptor Shoich Seino presents wall-mounted pieces at Don Soker Contemporary Art. Decoration and apocalyptic overtones meet in this work as they almost never do in American sculpture. (Note: The gallery will be closed this weekend but will reopen the Seino show during normal business hours Thursday through May 22.)
Two kinds of objects make up Seino's exhibition: roughly cubic forms, sectioned into smooth and rough halves, that hang about waist high, and sequenced small panels of black interrupted by similar forms with a coppery finish.
Seino casts these elements at extremely high temperatures. They combine copper and a ceramic graphite compound of relatively recent invention that finds uses in the aerospace and nuclear power industries.
Modern technology has annexed forces long associated with mythic visions of hell. Something of that hellish echo comes across in Seino's sculptures. The most rough-hewn ones look like relics of catastrophe. Inevitably, they bring to mind the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and perhaps, in the American context, the ruins of the World Trade Center.
The panel-like pieces make quieter reference to Japanese folding screens and personal Buddhist shrines which, when not in use, enfold radiant images in darkness.
The quietism of the latter series makes a fine foil for the incinerated look of the "cubes."
Kenneth Baker (San Francisco Chronicle)