ISAMU NOGUCHI

Qi was already a prominent figure in modern ink painting, and their time together led Noguchi to produce a series of works known as the ‘Peking Brush Drawings’ (all 1930). Three of these are exhibited alongside Qi’s own work. Eight of Noguchi’s formally related bronze sculptures that he created some 50 years after their meeting are also on view. By presenting works by Noguchi and Qi within the same space, the exhibition forges a temporal and spatial bridge in its continuation of an artistic dialogue between late master and student. Like Qi’s work, Noguchi’s ‘Peking Brush Drawings’ are devised as scrolls, a format that allows them to be rolled up, stowed and, traditionally, only taken out for special occasions. Scrolls were therefore occasions in and of themselves, in that their unfurling demanded slowed looking and anticipation as its contents were revealed. However, while Qi’s scrolls present East Asian motifs – foliage, flowers, birds and fruit – with hanging tendrils of Chinese script and luminous colour, Noguchi’s work departs from these subject matters and cultural convention.

The ‘Peking Brush Drawings’ profile a human form that just as easily disassembles into a tangled nest of lines. The artist deftly renders these figures by way of the two brush techniques said to underpin traditional Chinese painting: baimiao and feibai. Translating directly as ‘white drawing’ and ‘flying white’ respectively, both terms engage the tension between figure and ground – with ‘white’ referring to the negative space that comes into being through the demarcation imposed by the inscribed line. While baimiao involves the use of fine yet fluid ink strokes, feibai is the emphasis on a lightness and dynamism achieved by marks applied at differing pressures and speeds. Working in the spirit of Asian tradition, Noguchi privileges the art of the supple line above all else and leaves his markings spare, without wash or colour. Such drawings even presage the 1940s Western turn to Abstract Expressionism, a movement remembered for its ‘discovery’ of the intuitive, expressive qualities of mark-making, and its ability to register inarticulable feelings.

Longstanding East Asian aesthetic concepts such as these would continue to inform Noguchi’s practice, most apparent in his command of positive and negative space in works of sculpture. Presenting eight of Noguchi’s bronzes from the 1980s, ‘A Feeling’ testifies to the artist’s facility with bending the rules of working in three dimensions. Complex, puzzle-like works with interlocking planes, surprising silhouettes and irregular apertures characterise Noguchi’s late practice. The influence of Zen Buddhist thought, which he encountered during his travels in East Asia, can be felt in Noguchi’s penchant for reduction as well as his almost spiritual attunement to the interplay between form and void. That he chose to create works in bronze, however, speaks to a lifelong preoccupation with the fusing of ancient and modern ideas. ‘When the oldest alloy of the Bronze Age becomes a product of modern industry, the contradictory nature of time becomes apparent,’ the artist once said.

Rather than revert to traditional bronze casting, Noguchi’s bronze works are composed of metal sheets artfully cut, bent and assembled. To create these, Noguchi would often first work on compositions virtually, in calligraphy or with folded paper, before then turning to cut Styrofoam sheet models to test the sculpture’s structural basis. In the exhibition’s titular work, A Feeling (1988/2025), a figure-like form in bronze alludes to his early ‘brush drawings’ – with planes that recede into bare lines at certain viewing angles, becoming weightless leylines in ink. Giacometti’s Shadow (1982/84), Noguchi’s homage to the Swiss artist’s attenuated figures, meanwhile, affirms his visual lexicon as one equally devoted to the realm of the evanescent – be it shadow or negative space. ‘The folding creates structural strength. It also introduces three-dimensionality to appear solid,’ the artist has said, ‘or may be so without looking so, as I often prefer. A shadow.’

Other of Noguchi’s works extrapolate the classic subjects of traditional ink drawings as sculpture; Kaki-persimmons (1988/2023), for instance, appears as if to echo Qi’s Magpie and Persimmons (1948). Elsewhere, the title and topography of Cloud Mountain (1984/2025) immediately calls to mind the naturally formed protagonist gracing centuries of Chinese landscapes that Qi also sought to capture in his work Morning Glow (date unknown). With just the sparing use of three cut sheets, the sculpture successfully distils the dramatic ascent of misty peaks into a single, lyrical scene. Towering at over seven feet tall, Noguchi’s sculpture 2=1 (1988) similarly distils a concept. Here, the artist’s rendition of a duet is pared down to its essence: an embrace between two dark forms caught in the midst of their fusion as one. Produced in the final year of Noguchi’s life and the largest of the artist’s constructed bronzes, the work can be read as a monument to harmony and the reconciliation of contradiction. An assertion that two things can be true at once, 2=1 speaks to the prevailing idea Noguchi returned to throughout his life’s work – that of being an interlocutor, born of two different worlds.