Art critic Robert Pincus-Witten coined the term ‘ Post-Minimalism’ in 1971 to refer to the artists who rejected minimalism’s formal approach for more flexible forms (think performance, conceptual, and even land art) to reflect on their artistic process and personal concerns.Ĭontemporary artists like Tatsuo Miyajima, A i Wei Wei and Sopheap Pich, whose works possess varying degrees of abstraction and consist of modular units, continue Minimalism’s legacy. While the 1960s and early 1970s were considered the heyday of minimalism, the groundbreaking genre lives on in a number of ways. Object, which focused on the development of Minimalism in Southeast Asia. Po Po’s Red Cube (1986) was exhibited at Yavuz Gallery’s 2015 solo show Out of Myth, Onto_Logical - marking the artist’s first solo outside of Myanmar - before being included in National Gallery Singapore’s Minimalism: Space. In an attempt to break free from painting traditions, Red Cube consists of a canvas painted red hanging on top of a mound of rocks - recalling how Buddhist monks would stack rocks in a pile as part of their meditation practice. Burmese artist Po Po initially used abstract geometric shapes to evade government censorship, and his early work Red Cube (1986) has the appearance of a Minimalist piece. In spite of this, practitioners from the region produced work with Minimalist qualities as a means of resisting traditional or regime-mandated art styles. Minimalism as we know it today did not have a deep hold in Southeast Asia in the 1960s as many countries were occupied with gaining independence. These multiple ways of seeing testify to how a single object can lead us to reconsider our relationships with it and the space around us. Such an arrangement lends itself to different views that change depending on where you are standing in the room, or whether you’re even inside the room at all. A wedge of wood is wedged in a window, changing the appearance and view from the window at every angle. Suga’s Infinite Situation (Window) highlights the relationships between his chosen materials of wood and glass. Image credit: Sam Drake, courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland. Interior and exterior views of Infinite Situation (Window) (1970) at the exhibition Karla Black and Kishio Suga | A New Order at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Japanese sculptor Nobuo Sekine, site-specific installation artist Kishio Suga, and Korean-born practitioner Lee Ufan are prime examples of this. Mono-ha artists focused on the interdependency of natural and manmade materials - everything from stone to water, light bulbs to leather - and their surrounding space. It emerged in the mid-1960s when Japanese artists wanted to resist the American influences of avant-garde art and traditions of representational art. Japan’s Mono-ha movement is a prime example of this. These practices came from India and were later formalised in China, before cementing themselves in Japan by the 13th century.Īcross the decades, different countries in Asia developed their own versions of Minimalism - primarily as reactions to what was happening in their own societies. Many qualities present in American minimalist works, such as the repetition of geometric forms and a focus on simplicity and awareness, have their origins in Zen Buddhist practices. Minimalism in East and Southeast AsiaĬontrary to popular belief, America was not the sole birthplace of the genre. Untitled embodies Morris’s firm belief in the quality of Gestalt that patterns and configurations should have a greater significance as a whole than its individual parts. Robert Morris, Untitled (1965, reconstructed 1971). Other installations also made use of fluorescent lights, which paralleled the development of the Light and Space movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Morris’s Untitled embodies these qualities as it consists of four mirrored cubes that aim to draw spectators’ attention to the objects as well as their reflections of the surroundings. Minimalist sculptures are usually modular – meaning that they are composed of smaller forms – in contrast to traditional sculpture, where a larger block of material is reduced to what the artist envisions. Clinton Plaza (1967) is part of Frank Stella’s Black Series I, a line of lithographs that he used to champion his literal approach to art-making.
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