Yukihisa Isobe
Yukihisa Isobe
Yukihisa Isobe (b. 1935) (b. 1935) began his career as an avant-garde painter in Japan before relocating to New York in 1965 where he moved into the field of urban and ecological planning. In the summer of 1965, after visiting Europe for a solo exhibition at a Venice gallery, Isobe traveled around Europe, then visited New York and settled there, remaining in the USA until the mid-seventies. Isobe was already interested in modular constructions using wood, when he saw Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome at the 1967 Montreal Expo, and became interested in new materials and structures. Initially interested in tent and hanging structures, he gradually focused on constructed air structures using vinyl material. His Double Skin Structure (1968) was presented in “Some More Beginnings”Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” exhibition of 1968 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His interest in air as a material for art creation next led to creating a canopy-shaped parachute held aloft by air blown from below, titled Floating Theater. In a multi-media performance undertaken in spring 1969, Dream Reel, filmmaker Jud Yalkut projected film imagery on Isobe’s parachute canopy and added music. During the same period, Isobe collaborated with Light Art artists, Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, in producing “Theater of Light.” After embarking on a project using a hot air balloon through his employment with the New York City parks department, Isobe was then invited to participate in organizing the Summer Happening in New York City’s Hart Island for Phoenix House, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. He collaborated with David Behrman in 1969 on a balloon-driven remote audio feedback system which served as the basis for their unrealized Pepsi Pavilion event proposal for Expo ‘70.
In 1970, he entered the seminar of Professor Ian McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania in order to study ecological planning, eventually writing his master of arts thesis about ecological planning for Hart Island as the site of a therapeutic community for Phoenix House. His project Air Dome, was a temporary interactive structure installed in Union Square in 1970 in honor of Earth Day. In the mid-1970s Isobe returned to Japan and took the skills he learned from Ian McHarg to help with the urban planning for various regions in Japan, utilizing ecological inventorying and mapping landscapes. Isobe returned to artmaking in the 1990s with a series of large-scale collages titled Ecological Context, and environmental installations produced for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale. Many of his works are now housed at the SoKo Museum (Isobe Yukihisa Memorial Echigo Tsumari Kiyotsu Soko Museum of Art) in Niigata.