The stories he tells through the characters of Musui and Maiya, as we have seen, are intermixed with personal memories and fantasy and are not emphatically related to shared experiences of our times. Looking at them we might even say that, engaged with the narration of losses, he turns a blind eye to contemporary social realities.

But that is not quite true, for this is the chief burden of his smaller sculptures. The first of these was done in 1998, simultaneously with the first large sculptures of Musui and Maiya, and was called the Human Box. It represented a host of small figures, not more than five inches, flying down onto the surface of a little box. In subsequent versions the box became a hemisphere—suggesting, not surprisingly, the upper or northern half of the globe—or a house. In them the figures fly, stand, jostle, slip, cling, cluster and support one another. The metaphors become more clear and varied, all pointing to the singular theme of human migration.

~ R Siva Kumar

K S Radhakrishnan

The artist adopts neither a referential, self-consciously avant-garde approach nor a derivatively tribal folk style; instead, his style seems to spring from the form he seeks to convey, and uniquely suits its subject.

Radhakrishnan attributes the expressiveness of his figures to the example of his father, a thwarted actor who instilled in his son a passion for...

Radhakrishnan attributes the expressiveness of his figures to the example of his father, a thwarted actor who instilled in his son a passion for the potency of ritual dances and performances. Radhakrishnan's works often drawn from the emotions and myths of the Hindu gods, such as Shiva, Kali and Radha. His sculptures are often larger than life-sized; placed in the outdoors, they evoke a superhuman atmosphere.

Over the years, Radhakrishnan has experienced with alternate sculpting mediums, working in molten bronze, beeswax and Plaster of Paris. The physical process of working with the materials becomes a performance in itself. The sculpture is the product of a tactile engagement with his medium.