Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan focuses on the friendship between artists Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) and Saburo Hasegawa (1906–1957). Until his early death, Hasegawa was among the most renowned contemporary Japanese artists on both the East and West coasts of the U.S., credited with introducing European abstraction to Japan in his role as an art historian, critic, and art theorist.
Curators of the exhibit explain that the relationship between the two artists was kindled during Noguchi’s visit to Japan in 1950, as together they sought to understand and process the postwar world and art’s potential role in reassembling it. Noguchi and Hasegawa were each thinking deeply about the relationship between tradition and modernity and between indigenous and foreign influences in postwar art and culture in Japan and in their own work. Together, they undertook a wide-ranging study of traditional Japanese design, culture, and aesthetics. They visited a variety of historic sites across the country (temples, palaces, and gardens) and debated modernization with and without westernization, with the ultimate goal of making modern art in Japan through the “true development” of its traditions.
Comprising about 90 works by both Noguchi and Hasegawa, the exhibition will trace the impact their time together had on their contemporary and subsequent work.
The exhibition will be complemented by a focused installation of works by Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962) that were created in Tokyo in 2015. Comprising seven sculptures from Orozco’s Roto Shaku series and three Obi Scrolls, Rotating Objects is described by the Noguchi Museum as a contemporary example of sustained and serious thinking about what it means to develop Japan’s craft cultures in the present for the future.
