© The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / ARS. Photo: M+ Hong Kong.
NARRATOR:
Isamu Noguchi has a sculpture series in hot-dipped galvanised steel. In the exhibition Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, which opened in 2024, five works from the series—Mountains Forming, Wind Catcher, Root & Stem, Sky Mirror, and Rain Mountain—are displayed in a rectangular gallery space with a glass wall. The sculptures were designed between 1982 and 1983, and were subsequently made in 1984 and 2019. Each of them consists primarily of steel panels which are cut into different forms and assembled or fused together, creating minimalist silhouettes with clean edges. The panels are similar to the steel sheets often used in roadworks. They are light grey with lustre that changes with light. In bright light, the sculptures appear glossy; in dim light, on the other hand, they appear matt and bluish. Each sculpture is between twenty-six centimetres and three metres tall.
Mountains Forming is placed near the centre of the gallery space, while the taller works Wind Catcher, Root & Stem, and Rain Mountain each occupies a corner of the space, and Sky Mirror by the glass wall. The following are descriptions of two of the sculptures:
Sky Mirror, standing at twenty-six centimetres high, fifty centimetres wide, and forty-three centimetres thick, is a near-square steel panel with a supporting base. One end of the panel is raised to the height of an A4 paper, creating a slope that dips towards the floor. This work is placed by the glass wall facing Art Park to reflect natural light. As the sun hits the steel panel at different angles, the sculpture exhibits variations of lustre within the exquisite material.
Another sculpture, Rain Mountain, at 246 centimetres high, sixty-four centimetres wide and seventy-three centimetres thick, evokes waterfalls coming down from a wooded hill. The work comprises four long and slender steel panels and two shorter rectangular ones. The four slender pieces stand left to right on top of a rectangular panel on the floor, and about two-thirds of the way up, they are intersected by the other rectangular panel. The slender panels are positioned at different angles which resemble one’s palms pressed together and open like a book. The silhouettes of the panels emerge on the smooth surface, creating ravine-like shadows and highlights that remind us of waterfalls.