Oriental Esthetic

                                                  Isamu Noguchi

Consider the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi.  Early in his career he used a westernized name but later embraced his Japanese name and sensibilities. Please look at his children’s slide which is made entirely of marble and has a small entry hole in the back so a child can enter and climb stairs to the slide.  The attraction here is not that it is a slide made of stone but that the shape and proportions are so refined. 

The name of the work is Slide Mantra, made in 1986, shown at the Venice Biennale, then set up in Bayfront Park in Miami.  The park itself was founded in 1925 but was redesigned by Noguchi beginning in 1980 in his role as landscape architect.

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Going indoors now, please look at the functional and elegant cocktail table from 1947 also by Noguchi.  Note that the two leg modules are identical, can be detached, and are joined by an interior metal rod. The table was commissioned by the Herman Miller furniture company, has been in demand since 1947, and in production continuously for decades up to the present time.

 Dare an owner put cocktails, a magazine, or feet up on the Noguchi table?  That feeling of trepidation about putting an art object to practical use was keenly felt before the advent of Noguchi’s table. 

Owners of houses designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright had a whole house full of similar feelings and problems.  Besides the building, Wright designed the furnishings and set their placement. He was upset when people changed things in “his” house that they now owned.

                                       

Lee Ufan

Another artist who practiced lyric refined minimalism is Lee Ufan.  He was born in Korea but spent much time in Japan and Europe.  To set the tone, Ufan and Noguchi were avoiding the Western approach to art through expression and intervention.  Instead they cultivated respect for and love of materials together with  fluidity of observation. 

Please look at Ufan’s work of downwards appearing brush strokes that were actually made in a rotated position so he could brush horizontally.  He makes special paint by dissolving cobalt blue pigment in animal-skin glue.  He then loads paint on a brush and makes one continuous stroke to the right until the paint fades out.  It is claimed that he practices breath control to help make the proper stroke.  The fading out of the paint is said to represent the passage of time as the stroke is made. 

In the reproduction, the strokes look like matchsticks or a crowd of people.  Ufan made a series of such works in the 1980s that go by the name From Line.

            

Ufan made another series of paintings where the color fades out, but not from a single stroke.  Instead he makes a sequence of small individual strokes until the paint fades.  The series of paintings is called From Point.  

Please look at a painting from the series.  It shows discrete isolated square dabs producing a granularity of appearance  ‒  something like texture on a muted yellow background.  To get naturalistic, we could imagine machine gun bullets flying by, or fish in a school, or squadrons of sperms moving along.

Lee Ufan probably made the From Point painting by brushing horizontally then left it horizontal instead of rotating to vertical as with the From Point painting.  He must have had his reasons.  Notice the horizontal dot trails are in echelon or chevron formations.  

Can you speculate why he wanted the horizontal layout?  What are your thoughts about his color choices for the marks, their arrangement,  and the background in the two works?