CategoriesStyles and Movements
Mono-ha
Japanese movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s that set stone, wood, steel, glass and earth in simple, charged relationships.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Mono-ha are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Mono-ha, the 'School of Things', emerged in Tokyo around 1968. Its founding work is often taken to be Nobuo Sekine's Phase – Mother Earth (1968), a deep cylindrical hole dug in a Kobe park beside a matching column of compacted earth. The group's artists largely avoided making or shaping forms. Instead they placed natural and industrial materials together, often only temporarily, so that weight, tension and surroundings became the work.
Lee Ufan, a Korean-born artist and philosopher living in Japan, gave the movement much of its theory, writing about encounter and the relations between things and space. His Relatum works pair rocks with steel plates or sheets of glass. Kishio Suga arranged wood, stone and wire in taut, open structures, Noriyuki Haraguchi filled a steel tank with still, mirror-like oil, and Koji Enokura stained paper, cloth and walls with oil. Many installations survive only in photographs or later remakes.
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