Nobuo Sekine (b. 1942)

Among the most influential contemporary artists working in Japan throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Nobuo Sekine influenced the evolution of Japanese visual art. Born in Saitama, Sekine studied oil painting at Tama University of Art.  While attending university, Sekine was mentored by Yoshishige Saito, who is widely regarded as one of the most significant Japanese abstract sculptors of the 20th century. During this time, Sekine also served as an assistant to preeminent conceptual artist, Jiro Takamatsu, where he became well-informed on Takamatsu’s practices of shadow painting and reverse-perspective (for examples of Takamatsu's work, see 2011.29.1 and 2011.29.2). Influenced by Saito’s technique and Takamatsu’s ideologies, in 1968, Sekine produced a revolutionary series of relief sculptures titled Phase, which asserted the shift in his artistic style from two to three dimensions.

"Phase" is a term that Sekine applied to numerous works throughout the span of his artistic career, including Phase—Mother Earth, 1968. A few months after the conception of his Phase series, in October of 1968, Sekine participated in his first public exhibition, the First Open Air Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, at Kobe’s Sumarikyu Park, where he first realized Phase—Mother Earth.  Perhaps his best-known work, Phase—Mother Earth consisted of a hole dug into the ground nine feet deep and seven feet in diameter. Sekine then compacted the excavated earth into a cylinder-shape of exactly the same dimensions and erected it next to its enormous hole.  Recently re-installed in Los Angeles for the exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, this work has been acquired by The Rachofsky Collection.

Phase—Mother Earth was a groundbreaking work, not just literally, but for the ambition of its gesture and the implications thereof. Isolating and displacing the earth, aligning the presence and absence of its matter, and restructuring the natural world into a performative gesture had major implications for what would come next in Japanese Art.  The exhibition for which this work was created was sponsored by Asahi Newspaper (The Asahi Shimbun), which gave Phase—Mother Earth an award, bringing Sekine attention from various intellectuals, like Korean artist Lee Ufan. Over the following year, Sekine and Ufan exchanged numerous theoretical-based art commentaries based upon the implications of Phase—Mother Earth, which ultimately became the founding principles of the Mono-ha movement. Because of this sequence of events, Sekine describes the moment when the cylinder’s mold was removed as the “birth of Mono-ha.” [1]

[1] Alexander Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 194), 265.

Excerpted from above text: During the height of Mono-ha, Sekine achieved a high level of artistic notoriety and was selected to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale.  Following the biennale, Sekine remained in Italy and studied its urban environment.  Upon his return to Japan in 1973, Sekine established the Environment Art Studio and has since created artworks and monuments in several hundred places throughout the country. Since 1987, Sekine has been working on his Phase Conception series, which triggers changes in the concepts of painting and thought.  In 1993, he became the Director of International Sculpture Center, a non-profit organization in the United States, which contributes to the development of various global art projects.  Sekine’s work is represented in the permanent collection of distinguished Tokyo museums, such as, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art; National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo; and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art.  These works would be the first of Nobuo Sekine’s to enter a museum collection outside of Japan.

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