This work was first made at Gallery Kitano Circus, Kobe, in 1980. It consisted of a ring of twisted paper with stones nested in the paper and placed inside and outside the ring. Another feature of the 1980 installation was a small area of sand with small branches and a mirror propped against the wall. As with most works of Suga’s and other Mono-ha artists, the installation was viewed as ephemeral and its materials were thus discarded at the close of the exhibition.

Since the mid-1980s, Suga has remade earlier installations in response to the conditions of a given space, often significantly adapting the materials and scale of the work to respond to the new space. Suga does not attribute much importance to preserving “original” materials, so his remade installations are of equivalent value to the first versions.

Suga first remade Periphery of Space at his first European retrospective, titled Situations, held at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, in 2016. This vast warehouse-like venue has no walls, so he doubled the size of the ring and used more stones and left out the branches and mirror that were featured in the 1980 version.

At Mendes Wood DM in Brussels, the installation is closer in scale to the 1980 version, and Suga indicated where he wanted the stones placed once he saw photographs of them. Although the adjacent wall would have allowed him to recreate the mirrored/branched element as it appeared in the 1980 version, he chose not to.