Inside a 200-year-old former public bathhouse in Tokyo’s Yanaka district, UK-based Japanese artist Nobuko Tsuchiya has built a field of new sculptures that seem perpetually on the verge of collapse. “Ace of Hearts”, her site-specific project at SCAI The Bathhouse, opened on 4 November as part of Art Week Tokyo’s AWT Focus programme and runs through 19 December.

The project is curated by Martin Clark, director of London’s Camden Art Centre, and is one of ten curator-led Focus projects dispersed across the city this year, replacing the single central venue used previously. Art Week Tokyo itself runs from 4 to 8 November across a record 56 venues, with all Focus projects free to visit.

Tsuchiya is known for sculptural assemblages of found objects that play on the enigmatic and the familiar, working with fibreglass, fur, metal, resin, wire, felt, silicone and found materials. Clark describes the works as “little engines of atavistic agency” — clusters of matter that, despite their fragile, hybrid materiality, seem to activate realms beyond the purely physical, like objects recovered from a lost civilisation or a speculative future.

The new works unfold through the gallery as an interconnected environment rather than a sequence of discrete objects. Organic shapes emerge from industrial components, traces of human presence mingle with references to growth, decay, transformation and renewal, and the spaces between the sculptures matter as much as the sculptures themselves. The title, Clark suggests, offers an analogue for the awkward apparatus of our own bodies — the structures, organs and impulses that produce our strange, elusive, sensorial consciousness.