Mono-ha

Mono-ha (Japanese for 'school of things') is a pioneering art movement that emerged in Tokyo in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Instead of making traditional representational works, its artists explored materials themselves — stone, steel, glass, wood, water, soil, paper — and their natural properties, interaction and arrangement in space. Mono-ha artists reduced intervention to a minimum, leaving things as close as possible to their natural state and emphasising the relationships between elements rather than the objects themselves. The leading figure of the movement was Lee Ufan, a theorist and artist of Korean origin who in his writings drew on phenomenology and Eastern philosophy. Other participants include Nobuo Sekine, whose work 'Phase — Mother Earth' (1968), a huge cylinder of compacted earth beside a pit of the same shape, is regarded as emblematic of the movement, as well as Kishio Suga and Susumu Koshimizu. Mono-ha echoes Minimalism and Land art but is distinguished by a particular attention to emptiness, transience and contemplation rooted in the Asian aesthetic tradition.