若林奮

Born in Haramachida, Machida-machi, Tama-gun, Tokyo-fu on January 9, 1936. Finished Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School in March 1954, and entered the Department of Sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts the following year, in April 1955. While still a student, in February 1959, Wakabayashi held his first solo exhibition at Mitsugi Garō, Tokyo. The following month, in March that year, he graduated from university and began producing art at the house in Machida, where he was born and where his parents ran a cotton business. While repeatedly winning awards at the Nika Art Exhibition from the first time he submitted his work in 1960 until he withdrew from the Nika Association in 1966, he also submitted his works to exhibitions such as “New Generation of Japanese Sculptors” (1963, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), “New Generation of Contemporary Art” (1966, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), and “The 7th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan” (1966, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum), attracting attention from early on. According to Wakabayashi, “I do not make sculptures from iron. I make iron by means of sculpture.”(Note 1) His sculptures were linked to unique contemplation on iron, the main material employed in his works. Having been heated, hammered, scraped, and welded, the iron transforms into a sculpture, and eventually rusts and corrodes. Its enigmatic form, neither figurative nor abstract, accompanied by a poetic title sparks the viewer’s imagination. Early examples of Wakabayashi’s sculptures include “Remaining Element I–V” (1965, I–III. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama; 1966, IV. The National Museum of Art, Osaka; 1966, V. Toyota Municipal Museum of Art) and “To Thermal Metamorphosis I–II (I. 1964, Takamatsu Art Museum; II. [3rd Stage], 1965/1990, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art). Having seen these works at Wakabayashi’s solo exhibition held at Akiyama Art Gallery in Tokyo in 1966, Yanagihara Yoshitatsu commended them as follows. “He confronts a lump of iron and looks intently at its life.”(Note 2) The poet Katō Ikuya called him a “wizard of red-hot iron.”(Note 3) During the 1960s, besides producing sculptures, through his friendship with Hama Motoki, the leading industrial designer of FRP products, Wakabayashi also worked on cars molded in FRP, an experience which enabled him not only to learn techniques but also to broaden his views on sculpture. “Be it an airplane or a car, on the one hand, there is the shape seen from the outside, and on the other hand, the shape seen by the pilot or driver from the inside.”(Note 4) Having become aware of this, Wakabayashi turned his attention toward the inside and outside of a space or his relationship with the subject in nature. It was around this time that he began producing sculptures of “dogs as a paradigm of the natural world as opposed to the human world.”(Note 5) Meanwhile, in the latter half of the 1960s, open-air sculpture exhibitions began to be held in various parts of Japan. Wakabayashi submitted his works to the 2nd Contemporary Japanese Sculpture Exhibition (1967, Ube City Open-Air Sculpture Museum) and the 1st Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition of the Biennale of Kobe (1968, Suma Detached Palace Garden, Kobe), and “A Dog Inside, How to Fly” (1967, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama) and “Vapor from a Dog” (1968, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama) won prizes. The art critic Hijikata Teiichi described Wakabayashi’s singularity as “the one and only artist who expresses Kafka-like thought in the form of sculpture.”(Note 6) The artist’s interest gradually shifted from “mass” to “plane.” To Wakabayashi, the plane meant the surface of the sculpture placed in a space, the plane dividing the inside and the outside or aboveground and belowground. The work demarcating this conversion was “3.25 m Black Fly’s Wing” (1969, Expo ’70 Commemorative Park, Osaka), which was submitted to the “International Symposium on Iron and Steel” held the year before the Japan World Exposition Osaka 1970. This sculpture still remains in the Expo ’70 Commemorative Park, but all we can see is the iron sheet on the ground surface. According to the artist’s “wily imagination,”(Note 7) the main part, i.e., the fly, is hidden paradoxically belowground. In 1973, a solo exhibition entitled “Isamu Wakabayashi Exhibition: Sculptures & Drawings” was held at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura. In the autumn of that year, Wakabayashi went to France as an overseas trainee artist sponsored by the Agency for Cultural Affairs. Through spending a year or so visiting ruins in Egypt and Paleolithic cave paintings in the south of France and northern Spain, he became aware that though invisible, “numerous layers of ‘overpainting’ have been formed”(Note 8) beyond the wall before our eyes. How should one grasp the distance in space time accumulated from the present to the past or between oneself and nature? Wakabayashi sought hints in ideological “scales” to measure “oscillation,” which is, in essence, immeasurable. It was after producing “Three-Dimensional Note—Gas, Solid, Liquid” I–VIII (1973–1974, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art) in Europe and returning to Japan that “oscillation measure” emerged as a sculpture. “Study for Oscillation-Measure” I–III (II. [2nd Stage] 1976–1977, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; III. 1977, Takamatsu Art Museum) were presented at a solo exhibition held in 1977 (Gatōdō Gallery [present-day Yokota Tokyo]). “Oscillation-Measure” I–V (1977–1979), which followed, were also presented as horizontal bars. Meanwhile, “One Hundred Raindrops” I–III (I. 1976, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art; II. 1976–1977, Takamatsu Art Museum; III. 1977–1979, Asahikawa Museum of Sculpture in Honor of Teijirō Nakahara) are characterized by their perpendicularity. These works were presented as a new development founded on “oscillation-measure” at the 39th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 1980 (commissioner: Okada Takahiko). In the early 1980s, Wakabayashi set up an “Iron Room” in the work space at Musashino Art University, where he was working at the time, and from there, experimented with horizontal and vertical coordinate axes of his own. Regarding the space surrounding him, reexamination of the relationship between the inside and the outside of the “room” also led to reconsideration of the relationship between himself and nature. On the occasion of a solo exhibition held in 1986, he wrote as follows. “I had always wanted to make sure that I am part of nature. In order to confirm that, it was necessary to observe various things and make sculptures and pictures.”(Note 9) Going back a few years, in “Sakaigawa no hanran” (Gatōdō Gallery, Tokyo, 1982), a collection of his drawings and essays, he observed natural phenomena concerning the flooding of a river. To Wakabayashi, the organic cycle of nature changing from one moment to another conformed to the transfiguration of iron, which eventually rusts and corrodes. Based on such ideas, from around 1984, when Wakabayashi set up a studio in Mizuho-machi, Nishitama-gun, Tokyo, he began putting his thoughts into practice. “Something Belonging to the Green in the Air I” (1982, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art) was followed by “Something Belonging to the Green in the Air II” ([1st Stage] 1986, later modified, Wakabayashi Studio), which was presented at the 45th Venice Biennale (commissioner: Sakai Tadayasu) in 1986. The sculpture was transformed from a single piece into a large-scale installation composed of multiple parts. The artist’s viewpoint extended further to the outdoor space of gardens and unfolded as “The Garden at Takanawa Museum” (1982–1985, Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Nagano) and “The Garden at Shinji Shūmeikai Misono” (1986–1996, Shinji Shūmeikai, Shiga). In the meantime, he also worked on “100 Lines,” a series of canisters in which landscapes were created. Through rearranging the relationship or coming and going between nature and model, outside and inside, aboveground and belowground, Wakabayashi came to realize that “the ground surface is obscure.”(Note 10) Solo exhibitions of Wakabayashi’s works were held in various locations from the Venice Biennale onward. Following a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1987, at the solo exhibition held at Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, a catalogue covering all the artist’s sculptures from the early years on was compiled. Following the donation of drawings etc. from the early years on to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1992, “Supplement to Catalogue of Collections, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo: Isamu Wakabayashi, Collected Studies” (1994) was compiled, and an exhibition entitled “Wakabayashi Isamu: Drawings as Incidents” (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1995) was organized. In 1990, a solo exhibition of prints by Wakabayashi took place at Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, which was followed by “Isamu Wakabayashi: Smoke and Smog” (Ashikaga Museum of Art et al.), for which a catalogue recording his prints from the early years on was compiled. In 1997, the year Wakabayashi moved his studio to Mitake, Ōme-shi, Tokyo, besides “From 1989 Onward” (Nagoya City Art Museum et al.), which toured Japan, he also held a solo exhibition in Germany (Kunsthalle Mannheim et al.). In the 1990s, Wakabayashi participated in a movement against the construction of a garbage disposal plant in Hinode-machi, Nishitama-gun, Tokyo. In 1995, he began producing a garden on national trust property (the planned construction site). The poet Yoshimasu Gozō named this garden “Midori no mori ikkakujūza” (Unicorn’s Seat in the Green Forest). As the property was expropriated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the garden was destroyed and no longer exists. Underlying this work was Wakabayashi’s unique view of art that, despite intervention from the environment and administration, in essence, it remains by becoming extinct. Moreover, the “new garden” based on the idea of “repose,” which he produced by transferring the stones and plants in the former garden to another lot within Hinode-machi, led to a new phase of the death and regeneration of a garden. “Graceful Woods Surrounded by the Four Iron Cubes” installed at Kirishima Open-Air Museum (Kagoshima) in 2000 was the last garden Wakabayashi produced based on such circumstances and ideas. People “cannot keep watching the growth of trees.”(Note 11) Therefore, a garden should be entrusted to the plants’ timeline. This concept formulated by Wakabayashi would lead to “Daisy Underground” (2002) installed outside Fuchu Art Museum. After holding solo exhibitions at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in 2002 and Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in 2003, a solo show held at the then-Yokota Shigeru Gallery, Tokyo became his final solo exhibition. There, he presented “Flying Leaves and Oscillation” (2003, II, IV, VI. Yokosuka Museum of Art), small sculptures created on his sickbed. Wakabayashi was awarded the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize. On October 10, he met with an untimely death due to bile duct cancer (aged 67). After his death, following the artist’s wishes, a collection of essays “I. W—Wakabayashi Isamu Notes” (Shoshi-Yamada, 2004) was published, and “Valleys [2nd Stage]” was installed at Yokosuka Museum of Art in 2006. Thereafter, numerous studies on the achievements this extraordinary artist left in the history of sculpture in postwar Japan continue to be made including the restoration or reinstallation of works such as “The Garden at Takanawa Museum, Karuizawa,” “Something Belonging to the Green in the Air II,” and “Possession, Atmosphere, Oscillation: Outskirts of a Forest”（Musashino Art University Museum & Library）. (Asaki Yuka / Translated by Ogawa Kikuko) (Published online: 2024-05-12) Notes 1. Wakabayashi Isamu and Maeda Hideki, “Tairon: chōkoku kūkan, busshitsu to shikō” [Debate on the sculptural space, matter and thought] (Shoshi-Yamada, 2001), 74. 2. Yanagihara Yoshitatsu, “Wakabayashi Isamu: from the Gallery” [in Japanese], “Bijutsu techō” no. 264, March 1966: 122. 3. Wakabayashi Isamu, “Cars, Dogs, Sculptures” [in Japanese], “Geijutsu Shinchō,” vol. 19, no. 8, August 1968: 119. 4. Wakabayashi, “Cars, Dogs, Sculptures,” 119. 5. Wakabayashi, “Cars, Dogs, Sculptures,” 119. 6. Hijikata Teiichi, “On the 2nd Contemporary Japanese Sculpture Exhibition” [in Japanese], in “Gendai Nihon chōkokuten dainikai, sakuhin mokuroku zuroku,” exh. cat. (1967). 7. Wakabayashi Isamu, “Wily Imagination, The Potential of Contemporary Sculpture, Remarks by the Thirteen Artists Participating in the International Symposium on Iron and Steel” [in Japanese], “Mizue” 779, December 1969: 10–11. 8. Wakabayashi Isamu, “Sakaigawa no hanran 1976–1979” (Gatōdō Gallery, February 1982), 51. 9. “Isamu Wakabayashi: Drawings 1986,” exh. cat. (Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, 1986). 10. Wakabayashi Isamu, “Shichigatsu no reikyaku to kanetsu” [Cooling and heating in July] (Yayoi Gallery, February1986), 36. 11. Wakabayashi, “Cooling and heating,” 37.