Granite sculpture Garden Elements on display in the atrium of Yokohama Art Museum
offsite

Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan

Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama
January 12, 2019 – March 24, 2019

Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan focuses on the consequential friendship between Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) and Saburo Hasegawa (1906–1957). Until his early death, Hasegawa was among the most renowned contemporary Japanese artists in the U.S., credited with introducing European abstraction to Japan in his role as an active art historian, critic, and art theorist.

The brief yet productive relationship between the two artists was kindled during Noguchi’s visit to Japan in 1950, as together they sought to understand and process the fragmented 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. Comprising about 90 works by both Noguchi and Hasegawa, the exhibition will trace influences of their dialogue in their contemporary and subsequent work.

Organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York, Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan is curated by Dakin Hart, Senior Curator at The Noguchi Museum, and Mark Dean Johnson, Professor and Gallery Director at San Francisco State University. The exhibition will be on view at the Yokohama Museum of Art, in Japan, from January 12 to March 24, 2019; The Noguchi Museum from May 1 to July 14, 2019; and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco from September 27 to December 8, 2019.

Publications
Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan
Published to coincide with the major traveling exhibition, Changing and Unchanging Things is a lavishly illustrated account of how Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa’s joint exploration of traditional Japanese culture influenced their contemporary and subsequent work. The masterpieces in the exhibition—by turns elegiac, assured, ambivalent, anguished, euphoric, and resigned—are organized into the major overlapping subjects of their attention: the landscapes of Japan, the abstracted human figure, the fragmentation of matter in the atomic age, and Japan’s traditional art forms. Texts in English and Japanese.
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The Saburo Hasegawa Reader
The Saburo Hasegawa Reader is an open access companion to the bilingual catalogue co-published with University of California Press to accompany the international touring exhibition, Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. Available here is the paperback edition. This trove of Hasegawa material includes the entire manuscript for a 1957 Hasegawa memorial volume, with its beautiful essays by philosopher Alan Watts, Oakland Museum Director Paul Mills, and Japan Times art writer Elise Grilli, as well as various unpublished writings by Hasegawa. This resource is invaluable for scholars and students interested in midcentury East Asian and American art and tracing the emergence of contemporary issues of hybridity, transnationalism, and notions of a “global Asia.”
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Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan is made possible through lead support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Generous transportation assistance has been provided by ANA (All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd.). Major support has also been received from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. The exhibition is also supported, in part, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council and from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.