Yukihisa Isobe

Since its inaugural edition in 2000, Isobe has contributed monumental environmental installations to the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, notably Where has the river gone? In 2000, revealing to spectators man-made changes in the landscape.

Isobe was born in Tokyo in 1935. After being introduced to the artist Ei-Q while a student at Ueno high school, he joined the Demokrato artists association (デモクラート美術家協会) and was its youngest member. The group, which advocated for artists' creative liberty, was active from 1951 to 1957, and included notable figures like On Kawara, Ay-O, Toneyama Kojin, and Izumi Shigeru. Isobe began studying painting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1954, while continuing to frequent Ei-Q, a particularly important influence on the young painter. Curator Motoi Masaki has stated that the young artist struggled to make sense of their differing approaches, which were diametrically opposed: the university, with its "worship of technical mastery", ran counter to Ei-Q's belief in abandoning conventional modes of expression. Isobe produced diverse series of works during this period, predominantly abstract, ranging from paintings strongly influenced by the informel style, and "punch-card" paintings featuring a dot motif, indicating his interest for geometric repetition. Isobe exhibited his works at the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition from 1957 to 1962. Isobe graduated from university in 1959 and Ei-Q died shortly after, in 1960. Forced henceforth to forge his own path, Isobe fixated upon a shape that would occupy his paintings for the following years: the first works in his wappen, or coat of arms, series appeared in 1961. The artist filled canvases with these horseshoe-shaped forms, realized in bas-relief. Their execution varied across the years, as explains Motoi Masaki: "While the early wappens are painted to suggest actual coats of arms, the later wappens are distinguished more by the iteration of a prototypical shape, and color is only sparingly employed in recessed regions. In the latter, there is a return to form and to the infinite variety wrought through physical repetition." The wappen series, which included over three hundred works, excluding prints and watercolors, ended in 1965. At a solo exhibition at the Tokyo Gallery in 1964, Isobe exhibited his geta-bako (shoe cabinet) series. The artist had developed an interest since 1962 in using such cabinets with many small doors and cubbies, filling them with everyday objects like paper cups or pasting photographs onto their doors, or again employing the painted wappen motif. Isobe invited spectators to engage with the work by opening and closing the cubby doors and rearranging the objects within. When all of the doors to the cubbies containing their banal, everyday objects were closed, they revealed another artwork. The artist created a number of such cabinets decorated with reproductions of classical Japanese paintings, like those of 17th century master Sotatsu Tawayara. Motoi Masaki succinctly explains the implications of Isobe's interactive work: "What we initially held to be art submerges into the commonplace; everyday objects [...] ascend to the realm of art. Through the physical action of the viewer, the work becomes an apparatus for demonstrating the equality between the everyday flood of things and symbols and art itself." Isobe developed his box series by using larger tansu cabinets, which spectators again were invited to manipulate. He ceased production in 1965. Isobe was also a prolific printmaker. Working out of his studio in Aoyama, Isobe purchased a lithograph press in 1954. He is estimated to have produced between 1,000 and 1,500 lithographs during the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of Isobe's early works were collected by Ohashi Yoshikazu, an art collector, businessman and scientist. Isobe admitted that he was greatly influenced by Ohashi, saying later: "What I learned from Mr. Ohashi then, was not to think about art in a narrow way [...] maybe that is the reason why I left the arts to study science and ecology at an American university, beyond the frontiers of the art world?"

Isobe moved to New York in 1965 and stopped most of his artistic production shortly thereafter. He received a work permit in 1967 and that same year began working for the New York Human Resources Administration. A year later he was employed as an events coordinator for the City of New York's Parks Department. He also was a planner for the Phoenix House, a drug rehabilitation center. Despite his new professional turn, Isobe maintained an interest in new forms of creation, and was particularly fascinated by architectural structures that employed wind and air, like the Montreal Biosphere designed by Buckminster Fuller in 1967. In 1969, Isobe created Floating Sculpture, a parachute supported by wind currents in perpetual motion, realizing several artistic projects and performances with the parachute as apparatus. In 1970, as part of an Earth Day celebration, he created Air-Structured Dome, a large installation in Union Square, in which visitors could enter and move about. In 1968, his blooming interest in ecology led him to enter the Regional Planning Department as a postgraduate student at Pennsylvania University. He studied under the landscape architect Ian L. McHarg, who was a precursor of the environmental planning movement, with a focus on understanding and limiting the human impact on the natural environment. Isobe graduated in 1972 after completing his thesis, entitled "An Ecological Planning on the Therapeutic Community", inspired by his work on the Phoenix House. He began working as an urban and ecological planner in earnest from 1972 onwards, and established his own ecological planning firm, Regional Planning Team Inc, Co, in 1975. Isobe shifted his focus in 1975 to educating Japanese people about ecological planning. In 1976, he wrote an article that appeared in Kenchiku Bunka Magazine entitled "Ecological Planning: Methods and Application", which was well received by Japan's architectural community. He moved back to Japan in 1976, but did not immediately take his artistic practices up again, rather continuing his professional urban planning activities and teaching at various universities around Japan.