Changing and Unchanging Things: Two Artists in Postwar Japan

The friendship between the two artists did not only enrich their private lives, but also the development of their art in the post-WWII decades. “They were both concerned with the beauty of tradition and the power of abstraction,” said Dr. Karin G. Oen, one of the curators of the exhibition Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, currently on view at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Their friendship and artistic collaboration was based on the fact that they were both “interested in synthesizing modern art and modern forms with traditional Japanese aesthetics and materials,” noted Dr. Oen. 

Isamu Noguchi was born in 1904 in Los Angeles, the son of the Japanese poet Yonejiro Noguchi and American writer Léonie Gilmour. He was a landscape architect, sculptor, and designer (the iconic Noguchi Table is one of his creations). Saburo Hasegawa was born in Japan in 1906, graduated from the Tokyo University of Arts in 1926, studied painting in Paris in the 1930s, and exhibited his works in Europe and the US. During Noguchi’s trip to Japan in 1950, they traveled together around the country visiting temples and cultural sites. For both artists, it was important to explore art and its social value as well as the impact that WWII had in the creation of the new world order. The birth of globalization led Noguchi and Isegawa to wonder about their own cultural identities and the importance of artistic roots in an ever-changing and more globalized world. 

The strength of Noguchi and Hasegawa’s works, and of this exhibition, is simplicity. The essential, visible to the eye, emerges from Noguchi’s sculptures and Hasegawa’s calligraphies and drawings. This simplicity gives space to meaning and abstraction. For instance, Noguchi’s jars Man and Woman (1952) were created according to traditional Japanese craftmanship using Bizen stoneware clay and made by ceramists of the Kaneshige Toyo studio. These jars represent two abstract human forms while maintaining their practical purpose as vessels.

Among Noguchi’s creations, it is My Mu that perfectly brings together the materiality of sculpture with the philosophical concept of emptiness. Based on the character mu 無, meaning nothing, without, nothingness, the sculpture resembles a vessel where no physical matter can be contained. Based on Chapter 11 of the Laozi (also known as Daodejing), the philosophical and religious Chinese text of Daoism, the sculpture shows the importance of emptiness. “Mould clay into a bowl,” reads the Laozi, “the empty space makes it useful.” Vessels are useful only if empty; what is useful, therefore, is emptiness.

Hasegawa’s take on the same passage is a calligraphy piece with images of a vessel, a house, and a wheel. Even in this case, the empty space between the characters and the figures enhances and materialize the meaning of Laozi’s verses. In a similar way, Hasewaga transcribed and transformed a passage from another Chinese philosophical text, the Zhuangzi. His The Butterfly Dream (1956) is a calligraphic exercise based on the verses: “Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamed I was a butterfly [...] Did Zhuangzi dream he was a butterfly, or did the butterfly dream he was Zhuangzi?” The characters on the paper resemble the flight of butterflies, purposeful and ethereal, as well as the fragility and endurance of the human mind.

The vibrancy of Hasegawa calligraphies, prints, and drawings contrast and complement the immobility of Noguchi’s sculptures. The way in which this exhibition is constructed conveys the feeling of being in a garden where water flows among the stillness of trees. Yet the real message lies in the coexistence between the Japanese cultural environment that was shared by the two artists and their international, global outlook.