Yukihisa Isobe: Museum of Contemporary Art.
Matsui, Midori
"Landscape--Yukihisa Isobe, Artist-Ecological Planner," a
retrospective curated by Naoko Seki, provided an excellent overview of
the career of a genuine avant-gardist whose work has remained largely
unknown to the Japanese public. Born in Tokyo in 1935, Isobe began in
the mid-'50s as a post-Informel abstract painter who invented a
unique method of overlaying wooden board with emblemlike patterns made
of cardboard and plaster. A trip to New York in 1965 changed the course
of his career, as he was exposed to the holistic vision and innovative
flexibility of Buckminster Fuller's architecture and design. Isobe
stayed on in the US and studied with the ecologically minded landscape
architect Ian McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania while creating
his own architectural structures and many public performances. His
Floating Theater events, 1968-69, featured a parachute-shaped nylon
cloth buoyed by air, changing shape according to volume and stream,
accompanied by video projections and music performances; Isobe also
organized happenings that used a double-skinned vinyl air dome,
including one at the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, in New York.
Receiving his master's degree in ecological planning in 1972, Isobe
returned to Japan in 1973 and soon opened his own firm, Regional
Planning Team Associates. His thinking and skills proved timely given
the nascent Japanese interest in ecology, and he has performed a leading
role in many important urban projects since then. In 2000, Isobe resumed
his artistic activity, turning to the human transformation of the
landscape as a subject for his public interventions and performances.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
By juxtaposing documentation of performative public events in the
late '60s and early '70s with carefully selected early
paintings and recent plans for public projects, the curators revealed
the basic attitudes that have sustained Isobe's career. Both his
architectural constructions and his paintings combine biomorphic
patterns with geometric forms, sometimes accompanied by such interactive
devices as movable lids over painted patterns. All his work involves a
search for basic structures underlying the phenomenal world; an interest
in the reiteration of simple, modular units; and a willingness to make
the public the agent for realizing an artwork's phenomenological
and performative potential. Such tendencies attest to Isobe's
empathy with the spirit of Fluxus, which asserted the indeterminacy of
art and the role of audience as performer, and Archigram, with its
interest in the idea of a portable and changeable architecture to suit a
nomadic lifestyle. They also illuminate his synthesis of a traditional
Japanese sensibility that values the flexibility of a simple form--a
piece of paper or cloth creating a three-dimensional vessel without
solid supports, as in origami--with a solid philosophical framework and
the pragmatic methods of ecological planning. Documenting Isobe's
major works through photographs and videos as well as a reconstruction
of his air dome, and installing, in the museum's sunken garden,
Tokyo Zero Meter, 2007, his interventionist project warning that the
land under Tokyo is sinking to nearly sea level and is susceptible to
flooding, the curators traced the organic process of an artist's
development as individual producer and public planner, presenting the
productive result of a career that has involved him in the dynamic
reality of his time.
