CHANGING AND UNCHANGING THINGS
Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan
Asian Art Museum, San FranciscoSeptember 27 — December 8, 2019
Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan: January 12–March 21, 2019
The Noguchi Museum, New York: May 1–July 14, 2019
all text & images © Asianart.com and The Asian Art Museum except as where otherwise noted
Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, an exhibition of more than one hundred artworks that tell the story of an extraordinary friendship that helped shape the iconic midcentury aesthetic. In addition to Japanese American Isamu Noguchi’s (1904– 1988) renowned paper Akari lamps and instantly recognizable stone, wood and metal sculptures, the exhibition reintroduces audiences to Japanese calligrapher, painter and philosopher Saburo Hasegawa (1906–1957), whose contributions to a range of international artistic movements, including the Beats in San Francisco, have largely been overlooked due to his early death in 1957. Changing and Unchanging Things includes dozens of Hasegawa’s experimental photo collages that have never been displayed publicly and only recently emerged from storage in a Bay Area home.
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