Isamu Wakabayashi – Submergence –

Isamu Wakabayashi
Submergence
October 28 – November 30, 2010
TOKYO

Submergence I 2002

Kenji Taki Gallery / Tokyo is pleased to announce the exhibition Isamu Wakabayashi: Submergence.

This exhibition will feature the three-dimensional works Submergence I and Submergence II, as well as drawings from the Submergence series. This series represents one of Wakabayashi’s attempts in 2002 to reconsider and develop the concept of the “Vibration Measure,” which serves as a vital key to exploring the full scope of his artistic practice.

… matters that converge into landscape. I found myself with more opportunities to observe things outside the human realm—geology, weather, animals, plants, and minerals. The sole thing pertaining to humans was the question of what the very first picture drawn by a human looked like. … A vast nature existed as the backdrop to art.”

“Sculpture does not represent the objectified human. Rather, if we consider it to manifest the thoughts and actions of the human who creates it, this becomes not a matter of humanity as a whole, but of myself as an individual. The realizations prompted by the questions emerging from this line of thought became one of the inspirations for the Vibration Measure.”

(Interview with Isamu Wakabayashi: Exhibition catalog published by the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, 2002, pp. 102-103)

Submergence offers what appears to be a bird’s-eye view of a landscape completely transformed by floods and rising river waters. Using the “Vibration Measure” as a scale to gauge the space that fills the distance between himself and his subjects, Wakabayashi attempted to explore and give physical form to the uncertainties that exist within these intervals and spaces.

Furthermore, Wakabayashi incorporated dogs and their perspectives into his work, viewing them as beings that exist in the realm between the natural world and humanity. His pieces, formed through the massive accumulation of paper fragments, reveal an artist engaged in a deep confrontation with the element of time.

A reconsideration of the “Vibration Measure”—a concept he initiated in 1970 which also served as the title for his early pieces—alongside the canine perspective and the succession of blue-painted paper fragments: through the Submergence series, works from the very end of his life, we trace the trajectory of Wakabayashi’s contemplations.

左：水没 I Submergence I 2002
右：水没 II Submergence II 2002

left: Drawing of Submergence II 2002
right: Drawing of Submergence III 2002

left: Drawing of Submergence I 2002
right: Submergence II 2002