In my work I research human interactions within institutional architectural spaces . I like to show space as a ‘language’ which is universally revealed in certain types of buildings. I explore spaces which have no meaning without content and in which visitors can project their own ideas.
My work is also influenced by the sociological narratives that are projected into a physical site, thereby informing how its inhabitants will reflect on the site and its contents.
Parallel to my art, I am the Netherland’s leading Cold War nuclear bunker specialist. This interest stems from my experience of nuclear bunkers as possessing a distinctly subdued sensorial impact – they are tranquil spaces. These bunkers are ‘cavities’ hidden beneath bustling, oftentimes overwhelming metropoles.
However, though such bunkers were essentially constructed as sites of protection, these very concealed monuments radiate a paradoxical atmosphere.
In more recent years, I also spent extensive periods travelling through Japan, researching the country’s traditions and philosophies of space, architecture and conservation. The notion of ‘Ma’ – architectural illusions, space that appears empty or without obvious function – is my main focus.
To feel lost in a space is to fully immerse oneself in it. With a deep curiosity to create an unforgettable experience for the audience, Kees van Leeuwen designs sculptures that invite viewers to both feel and witness something exceptional. Each piece is carefully crafted to provide a complete experience that goes beyond mere visual appreciation, engaging multiple senses and encouraging direct interaction between the viewer and the artwork. Read the interview to learn about his methods and more about his work.
K: “I’m currently working on an exhibition downstairs for Nieuwe Vide for next year. I’m working with how people experience space and how people experience history in space. This is something that I’m trying to combine with the recognition of space but also recognizing things in objects and what the knowledge is when people recognize the objects. The disappeared history of the objects that people don’t know anymore, what something is or what they are used for, is what I’m working on. To say it simply.”
K: “This is something that I have been busy with for a very long time, I’m over-sensitive to stimulations. And I always had this strange and unusual relationship with spaces. How close things are to me, how things relate to each other in space and I always thought it was normal, like everybody had and recognized this. Years later, I did two courses, Fine Arts, and Architecture at the same time. It was a lot of work and I was only allowed to graduate at one location and eventually, I did in Fine Arts. I realised by talking with my colleagues from the Architecture course, that they spoke very differently about space than I did. There were a lot of misunderstandings and I realised that I had another view of space, and I needed to look into what this thing, this space, and how people look around spaces. This is kind of how my fascination began with this kind of subject.”
K: “Inspiration comes from experimenting spaces. Strangely enough. One of many interesting spaces that I found in my first year in Art School, was actually when I moved here to Haarlem, I visited a nuclear bunker, by accident. It was open Monument day and I went to the Provincial House (Provinciehuis) here in Haarlem, and someone asked me if I wanted to visit the nuclear bunker. And was like ‘..yeah, where is it?’ and they pointed out the window and said ‘you have to wait at that door at two o’clock to be allowed in’. When it was time, a lot of people showed up and I thought ‘Good, I’m not the only crazy one’. The door opened and we were allowed downstairs by these very big steel doors, and we walked into a 60’s bar place, with a cantine, and behind the bar was a generator room, an airy room and then there were beds, and we walked further and it was like a normal office, with computers, things, exactly like a normal office. Mostly, being over-sensitive I know how old buildings move, there’s always noise, and there, was the first space in my life where there was nothing, no noise. Completely silent, the only thing that I could hear was other people looking around. No temperature change, nothing. And I was amazed thinking ‘What is this space that looks like a normal office but it’s so different?”. So I became very much interested in nuclear bunkers. And this is how I get inspiration, by experiencing spaces and trying to find what it is, and trying to show people what strange spaces are and how space can be.”
K: “I learned very quickly from myself that I’m someone who thinks in a 3D form. I did try painting, but I always wanted to show the backside of a painting. I had a colleague who was also busy with projects around spaces at the time and he likes to create this illusion of depth, and he’s very good at that. But I want to show everything, not the illusion of something. I want to show the whole space. That’s how I realised that I’m a sculptor, who wants to make 3D things. That’s also the reason I take photographs. There are some spaces that I cannot replicate, that’s such a unique experience to be there and people cannot get to these kinds of spaces. I have this photograph that’s an underground nuclear bunker in Germany that’s kilometres long. The location you see there it’s a 3-hour walk from the entrance. I spent the whole day underground with another photographer, taking even lunch inside to avoid walking back and forth in the middle of the dark, since there was no light, only a couple of lamps. We were taking breaks and taking photographs and it was quite an experience to be again in this space that’s a lot of kilometres underground. You could feel the mountains and only hear water dripping somewhere, and the only way I could present this was with a photograph.”
K: “I always try to get people an experience. A feeling of space, and make them aware of what they see and what they feel. Interestingly, I have found a bit of a duality in my work. Because of my interest in isolated spaces, the bunkers…I became a bunker expert in the Netherlands. I have been asked by multiple governmental agencies to write reports and give advice about the monumental saving of these bunkers.
It gave me a lot of access to these kinds of spaces that are hard to get to. And something about me is that I like to explain things, I like to show things. But I realised by experience that if I explain the things that people experience in my work, it becomes flat. In my work, I always avoid explaining too much and show them instead. But not everyone experiences the same thing or experiences at all. I remember with my Art End-Exam work that I made this giant wall in a room, and you come into the room through a door, and you have two choices. You could go into a wide dark hallway or you could go to the narrow hallway into the light. It was a kind of choice game, where you could go to an open space but with complete darkness, or to a narrow space but into the light. I thought it was an interesting experiment but some people were confused about what was part of the artwork, they didn’t understand the complete thing. I realised that I had made a very interesting mistake, as there was no visual interest point in the space. You walked into a wall with a choice of two ways, and half of the people stepped into the door, looked sideways, and ended up going away because nothing was interesting to see. They only saw two hallways, dark or light. The other half walked in and experienced the work and were quite amazed. I realised that I made an experiment by mistake on who was curious and who was not. But at the same time, if I had put an arrow to show people where to go, it would go against the whole point of the work. It is very difficult to find the balance on how to make this work and be sure that people would experience something. I think it’s a very terrible metaphor but I try to make this kind of onion work: the first layer would be the first initial experience as you walk into the work and as you go into it you find more and more layers. So that everyone will have an experience, be it having an initial look around and going away or a profound experience where they meet all the layers. That’s what I always try to do in my work.”
“This is the interesting part of nuclear bunkers. That’s why I have been so fond of them. These spaces are designed to be secure and very simple with a one-way in and one way out. There’s also this flow in the space that you can walk through. It’s similar to museum spaces, which I love as well. In a museum space, though, it is more of an illusion of silence, while the bunkers are pure isolation. I, however, like the quietness of both these spaces.”
K: “That’s a good question…My creative process is quite interesting. There are actually two stages of it, the first being inspiration as I walk around searching for meaningful things and looking for spaces and having some strange initial ideas. The second stage is doing and making. And making is very much like, sitting down and thinking about all the strange ideas trying to see how I’m going to make them, and then, doing it. And that’s always the difficult part, the beginning is always an enigma. Making it and then looking at it for what it is, is better. Most of the time, I don’t think about what I’m making, and in the end, I have a strange sculpture, and then I think “Okay, is this interesting or not?”. Then if it’s a no, I wonder how I can make this better, and what I need to do. It’s a process of researching and making it, and always trying to make it better. And constantly looking at it again and again, and you end up following your thought pattern by making it. I’m actually dyslexic and I cannot read or write, so I always had to find other ways of learning and I found out that physical learning is my way of doing it. And this is the highlight of my work, I research my making.”
K: “My motivation has some interesting points. I see my work as the only way to express myself. People write books or write things, and I make sculptures to explain the world, and what I see and understand. This is my method of communication, it is the only way where I can communicate with this world and make sense of it. Because of my handicaps, it is very hard for me to hold a job, so I also consider this my contribution to society, of giving something back to this world.”
K: “That’s also a very good one. I had an interesting fight with my teacher about this.She asked the same question about what’s the goal and I said I would be happy already to have a studio where I can make work. And yes, I have one now. She was worried I didn’t have ambitions. But I have a very strange sense of time. I have ambitions, I would like to do things. For me, time isn’t like a movement. Whenever I need to do something, I think about all the steps I need to get there and ambitions are something ideal that you don’t know how to get there. I would like to make a sculpture the size of a house or building. This is one of my ambitions. I would like to show my work on that scale, but I don’t know how yet. But this is not something that I see now, that’s possible. There’s no ambition in my mind of that being possible in the near future. I also make installations and effectively for me there’s no size difference. The installations or small work are, in my mind, on the same scale. I hope eventually that my small works are going to be built big. And of course, I have other goals. I have never actually had real schooling, I never went to high school. I automatically went to the Art Academy, without any diplomas. It was quite amazing and I was lucky that this was allowed in that period. I did do my Masters and as someone who cannot read or write, I’m quite proud of that. I still dream of doing a Doctorate. I would love to write a PhD. In the meantime, I hope to continue doing my work and I keep searching for interesting exhibition spaces.”
K: “After losing traces of one of my works due to a lack of photographs, I am more aware of recording them. But I also realised the limitations of it. My installations are very much about the experience of space and videos or photographs never manage to capture it. It is really difficult. You can always photograph one side and there’s always somewhere missing. It is nearly impossible to photograph the experience. I had a professional photographer to help me photograph, and he managed to make a few nice photographs, but not the whole experience. You cannot see the things that go around or the things on the corners. It is very difficult to photograph these kinds of works. I have given up a bit in that case. I have also tried recording as videos, but the problem is that the dimensions are still missing. You can get more sense of the space, and you can understand better how things are connected. However, I like to think about how people walk around the space, so I keep thinking ‘What if this person looks this other way? ‘. I always say I can control two things: the space and the object, I cannot control the person, or in this case, their choice.”
K: “I really like to use things that already exist in my works. I like to use objects that have already been used. I like them to have a certain history, where you can see the age for example. I’m also terrible with colours. I like to bring pieces that already have different colours. I like people to recognize the objects, and think about what they are doing there.”
K: “Oh..I choose spaces that have a particular experience. Spaces that people lose their context, that people are so in that they have no idea what it is. It has to do with what we recognize as spaces and what we recognize in certain spaces. People recognize churches, houses, and nuclear bunkers, for example, people don’t recognize this kind of space. I also like spaces where people recognize them but don’t know the extent of significance around that space. I realised that like objects, spaces have a kind of memory, they have a kind of feeling. As I bring someone who doesn’t know anything about the history, to a German nuclear bunker, they would walk in and still feel something about the space, they would manage to recognize that something happened there. And this is the kind of space that I’m looking for, with a weird history.”