HECTARE is pleased to present “NO SALE”, an exhibition by the artist unit 36C, formed by Taketo Masui and Ayumu Nemoto. 36C creates sculptural works that resemble furniture, combining ceramics with wood. The structures are built from formwork plywood, commonly used at construction sites to cast concrete, while tabletops and armrests incorporate ceramic elements glazed with metallic finishes. Although these works retain functional forms, their practicality is deliberately undermined by the fragile and cold nature of ceramics, allowing their sculptural presence to come to the fore.

The completed pieces were brought to a secondhand shop and assessed as furniture. The appraised values amounted to only a few hundred yen, while some were deemed unsellable. To objects of no recognizable brand or provenance, a numerical price was nonetheless assigned. In that moment, the works stepped outside the framework of art and were treated purely as “things.” This brought a paradoxical sensation: a sense of recognition that these forms were acknowledged as objects, coupled with the chill of seeing their existence reduced to a mere number. Within the structures of distribution, value is often defined unilaterally by price. Even objects that exist beyond practical use are measured by the same scale once they enter that system. By positioning their works outside of it, 36C seeks to reveal the faint outlines of the frameworks through which value itself is constituted.

At once furniture and sculpture, drifting between utility and non-utility, these works resist fixed roles or meanings. Their ambiguity does not signify emptiness through the loss of function, but rather an openness: a space that allows them to continue existing without definition, quietly inhabiting the exhibition space.