Kees Ouwens: Five Decades of Stone, Landscape, and Spatial Practice from Utrecht to Michoacán

Key facts

• Kees Ouwens was born in the Netherlands in 1958 and studied Garden Design and Landscape Architecture at the Royal Horticultural College in Utrecht from 1978 to 1981.
• In 1982 he went to Japan to study abstract Japanese garden construction, stone sculpture, art, and culture, spending three years with garden architect Shoji Miyamoto and two years with sculptor Tanaka Tanzo on Shikoku.
• His first monumental sculpture was created in 1985 at the Ohtsuki Art Symposium in Kochi Prefecture; his first stone sculpture exhibition followed in 1986 at Gallery Balai Budaya in Jakarta.
• He founded Niwa-International in the Netherlands, making abstract gardens and stone sculptures, and reframed his projects as "spaces."
• He works with basalt, granite, green schist, marble, sandstone, and locally found stones, following what he calls the "Rules of Nature."
• Notable projects include Nucleos of the Forest in Darmstadt, Stone Forest for the 2009 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, and Expectation-2 for the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale in South Korea.
• He returned permanently to Japan in 1994, built O-Huis in Seiyo, Ehime Prefecture, in 1996, and founded the Seiyo Art Initiative in 2010; O-Huis was later preserved as Atelier O-Huis, a two-room museum-like art hotel.
• He moved to rural Mexico, living there almost 15 years, and built La Coyotera Taller-Estudio in Umécuaro, Michoacán, in 2014, completed in 2016, where he initiated the annual Proyecto en Sitio.