青木野枝

Aoki Noe was born in Nerima-ku, Tokyo in 1958. After finishing Tokyo Toritsu Geijutsu Kōｋō (present-day Tokyo Metropolitan Senior High School of Fine Arts, Performing Arts and Classical Music), she proceeded to the Department of Sculpture, College of Art and Design at Musashino Art University, Tokyo, and completed the graduate course there in 1983. Having encountered iron in her third year at university, she found it compatible and thereafter employed it as her main material. In the initial years, she combined ready-made iron rods and sheets to create tents, towers, and skeleton-like forms of animals. When placed directly on the ground, such works remind us of a house or a religious “yorishiro” (shrine where a god resides) embracing and protecting the people, household possessions, and relics inside. Just as a certain construction for living in or praying at symbolizes a certain group’s worldview, by creating an iron sculpture and placing it somewhere, Aoki presented her own view of the world. More than half of Aoki’s sculptures no longer remain in the form they were originally presented in. The reason is that she assembles the parts she has cut out of a sheet of iron at the exhibition site, and disassembles them once the exhibition comes to an end. It was from the latter half of the 1980s, when she was invited to group shows in Japan and abroad, that Aoki began employing this method. Aoki did all the fusing of the iron sheets and her handprints can be identified on the cut surface. The bigger the work, the more parts are required, and the majority of the time taken to produce a work is spent on fusing. At solo exhibitions held at Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo in 1994 and the National Museum of Art, Osaka the following year, in 1995, gentle lines cut out of heavy, solid iron rose forcefully and divided the space in a placid manner. In 2000, a major solo exhibition entitled “Aoki Noe —Iron, Airy-Fairy” was realized at Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo. Taking her practice of setting up her works on-site one step further, she decided on the forms and positioning of her works according to the character and size of the architectural space. Thus, the works were integrated into the space. The viewers walking along the floor would encounter the works while moving in and out of them. It became a more open experience. That year, Aoki won the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Encouragement Prize for New Artists, marking a turning point not only in her work but in her career as an artist. From 2000 onward, Aoki also began to take part in art festivals such as the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (Echigo-Tsumari, Niigata) and the Setouchi Triennale (Takamatsu Port Area and Teshima, Kagawa) held in different parts of Japan. Before installing her work, Aoki would build relationships with the local residents by holding workshops etc., and keep visiting the area regularly after the festival. This is because she believes that the sculptures symbolizing her own worldview must not casually intrude into other people’s worldviews. It is also a direct action she has taken toward the question of what an artist can do about the reality of the severe progress of depopulation and aging in the provinces. In 2012, major solo exhibitions, “Aoki Noe: All That Floats Down,” were held concurrently at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art and Nagoya City Art Museum, providing an opportunity to recapitulate her achievements over approximately thirty years. Thereafter, she continued presenting her works energetically and realized three solo exhibitions, “Aoki Noe: All That Floats Down” (Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum), “Aoki Noe Sculpture Exhibition” (Kirishima Open-Air Museum, Kagoshima), and “Aoki Noe: Fog, Iron, and Mountains” (Fuchu Art Museum, Tokyo), consecutively from 2019 to 2020. The following year, in 2021, she was awarded the 71st Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Encouragement Prize. It was in 2017 that Aoki incorporated glass into her iron sculptures. In the 2020s, glass came to reveal a presence second to iron. Glass transmits light and reflects the surrounding situation. Via a pandemic, in an era afflicted with crucial issues such as violation of human rights and war, the people’s sentiments of anxiety, fear, and rage are mirrored on the glass surfaces. In 2025, the year marking thirty years from the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, “Offering / Hyogo” was installed in an outdoor space of Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art located in the disaster-stricken area. Standing by the memory of the people who experienced this tragic disaster, the centripetal sequence of circles and spheres catches the wind blowing from the mountains toward the sea and sends it off. Here, Aoki’s sculpture represents “our” worldview. While inheriting modern sculpture, which began at the beginning of the twentieth century, Aoki developed a hollow space demarcated by self-supporting iron lines, different from the sense of mass in traditional sculpture, in a way of her own. The composition of iron is the same wherever it is cut out. In other words, a part and the whole are equivalent, and an airy form composed of similarly shaped parts is irrelevant to the gradient between center and periphery. Lying in the background of such a characteristic is the situation in the 1980s, during which the act of producing and subjects were reinstated and pluralistic values were applauded in reaction to the strongly reductionistic 1970s. On the other hand, Aoki’s choice of materials and techniques and the composition of her works are simple and narrowed down to the minimum, a trait which connects her to the preceding generation. One could also say that, from the 1990s, she realized one after another large-scale display at museums all over Japan in response to the expectations from the museums, which were vitalized during that period. Above all, Aoki’s distinctive character lies in her flexibility and unrestrained attitude extending beyond the category of contemporary art. Aoki’s sculptures are, in most cases, produced for a specific site and are dismantled once the exhibition period is over.(*) Aoki continues to dedicate the vast amount of labor and time required to repeat such processes to her sculptures. Her efforts over the past forty years to create a sculpture as an ephemeral existence are indeed what make Aoki a rare existence. (Kamiyama Ryōko / Translated by Ogawa Kikuko) (Published online: 2024-05-08) * Not all works are dismantled. There are some works that are designed for permanent installation and other self-supporting works that have been acquired by museums etc.