Katsuhisa Sakai

Katsuhisa Sakai
Sculptor
Tehachapi, CA

We learned of multidisciplinary artist Katsuhisa Sakai on the very first day of this project.
While photographing Tobias Jesso Jr., we noticed a striking sculpture on his coffee table. When asked about it, his face lit up. “You must meet Sakai and Sonoko,” he insisted. Tobias’ enthusiasm was infectious; before long, we were weaving through the Angeles National Forest — headed north to Katsuhisa Sakai.

Born at the end of World War II in a bomb shelter in Tateyama City, Japan, Katsuhisa Sakai divides his time between Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood — where he lives with his wife Sonoko — and a second house in Tehachapi, a small farming community in the high desert. A lifelong artist, Sakai creates work that holistically considers the ways sculpture might be rendered in multiple forms and across dimensions.

In the quiet Tehachapi ranchlands, Sakai’s working days are planned around feeding the horses and avoiding the direct heat of the sun, which lingers high in the early summer sky. The nuances of the desert have been constants in Sakai’s last decade, during which he’s focused on creating a series of permanent stone sculptures. From the Salton Sea to the Mojave, Sakai has moved from location to location — finding remote plots of land, taking up residence, then designing and installing a sculpture in the desolate landscape. When the work is complete, he moves on and does it all again. The desert works are unmarked and constructed anonymously, at once primitive in their materiality and conceptually experimental. Intentionally welcoming confusion and pause, they invite the viewer to ask what, why, how, and when…and purposefully evade a tidy answer.

Finding rhythm in the practice, Sakai works with a disciplined rigor punctuated by rituals of his making, from miso soup breakfasts to a daily routine that toggles between painting, woodworking, and construction with stone. His adherence to the practice of working is a reminder: a necessary component in the elusive search for inspiration is a dedication to showing up every day, taking one’s time, and wading through the process.

“I think of the human experience as a tool to work with,” he explains. “And time as an ingredient that’s just as important as space or medium.”

To complete his vision for the desert sculptures, he’s got eight more to go. “I don’t think I’ll be able to make these when I’m 100,” he admits as we drive away from the Tehachapi site. “Maybe I should start working a little faster.”

MAKING SENSE VOL. 1
CALIFORNIA

TOBIAS JESSO JR.
APRIL VALENCIA
SEAN FRANK
MONROE ALVAREZ
BRIAN LEE
MOLLY SEDLACEK
IDO YOSHIMOTO
ZOE DERING
OBI KAUFMANN
ERICA CHIDI
SONOKO SAKAI
KATSUHISA SAKAI

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Full story available in Making Sense Vol. 1 Book

Making Sense is a publication series with Le Labo Fragrances that is a study in distilling life to its essence, as told through the stories of 12 individual who have fearlessly hand-crafted lives of their own making.

Read more about the series here.

Tehachapi, CA

Ido Yoshimoto

Molly Sedlacek

Faculty Department, Le Labo — Making Sense Vol. 1