EIJI OKUBO ART PLANTS
Walking on the Quest
Art garden
Land Art and Earth Works are experimental art that emerged in the mid-1960s and developed mainly in the United States and Europe in the 1970s. Land Art tried to break out of the modernist art, that is, the White Cube (art museum or museum), and expand and express art more freely.
Early land artists were confined to the exhibition spaces of museums and galleries. From there, the art that was confined within the commercial framework was released into the new space of nature. In other words, unlike the conventional method of simply transferring nature onto a canvas, Land Art uses nature itself as a canvas. It was a new creation of art in nature. These Land arts mainly took the form of editing the landscape (nature) itself and using natural materials to create works of art on a huge scale in the natural environment.
On the other hand, in the case of Land art that developed in East Asia, although it was similar in time to Western Europe, it began to be developed by artists active in Japan.
Japanese Land art bears some similarities to Western Land art, but on the other hand, it also includes cultural and philosophical approaches unique to Japan. Rooted in Japanese aesthetics and traditional values, Japanese Land art seeks a harmonious relationship between the work and the natural environment. It can be said that he was influenced by the concept of wabisabi, which emphasizes the beauty of the imperfections of Japanese art. We can find such characteristics of Japanese Land art in the work of Eiji Okubo.
As a first-generation Land artist in Japan, he sought to reveal the cultural spirituality peculiar to Japan through his work. As a result, his work began to focus on the harmony and content aspects of the work and its surroundings. As a result, his work began to focus on the harmony and content aspects of the work and its surroundings. This is a good representation of Japan's peculiar Land art. Eiji Okubo's works bring together and carefully arrange natural elements such as stones, trees, and plants, emphasizing the aesthetic gaze of landscapes and evoking speculation. However, most of his works are both place-specific and time-specific, as they are designed to disappear over time and are made to react to the forces of nature. In short, while general earth art tends to challenge the traditional boundaries between art and nature, Eiji Okubo's work emphasizes the harmony and interconnectedness of all elements.
Eiji Okubo's work reveals subtle connections between the narratives of his work and the surrounding environment.
Such connectivity begins with "walking," which Eiji Okubo pursues as an attitude in his artistic practice. To explain it again, he emphasizes the production process rather than the completion of the work, working in a way that he collects things while walking and collages them into the environment using selected stones and wood. In addition, the form of recording the land appears in the work as evidence that he himself walked through it. For Eiji Okubo, this "walking" is a means of transcending time and space, and can be said to be proof of existence. In this way, Eiji Okubo continues his exploration of the flow of time by figuring out the relationship between humans and nature.
2023 Cian Art Museum