From Environment to Ecology:
Yukihisa Isobe’s Practice Renders Visible the Flux of Wind

Naoko Seki
Professor, Waseda University

 For half a century, Yukihisa Isobe (b. 1935) has been active as an ecological planner, making recommendations to stakeholders based on regional ecological surveys. In March 1969, he collaborated with the video artist Jud Yalkut on Dream Reel: Mixed Media Performance in Isobe’s Floating Theater, a milestone in Isobe’s lifelong endeavor to connect art with the environment. After a decade of working and exhibiting as a painter and printmaker in Tokyo, Isobe moved to New York. In 1967, he visited Expo 67 in Montreal, where he was intrigued by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, a bold innovation in terms of both structure and materials. The following year, Isobe and Masanori Ōe exhibited an inflatable structure in the Some More Beginnings exhibition, presented by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Four months later, Isobe collaborated on Dream Reel at the State University of New York, Oneonta with Yalkut, who was exploring expanded cinema and experimenting with projecting films in novel viewing environments. Isobe envisioned a structure in which a parachute was anchored to the floor with multiple strings, and air from fans below blew it outward to produce a concave projection surface. The structure surrounded the audience, delivering an immersive experience in contrast to conventional unidirectional viewing of a flat screen. Isobe named this structure the Floating Theater, referencing the way in which airflow uplifted the fabric membrane to transform it into a dome. He subsequently brought the parachute outdoors, where the direction and force of natural winds altered its form, and designated it as a Floating Sculpture. This shift represented a move from artificial indoor spaces to outdoor environments and rendered visible wind patterns that are difficult to track with the naked eye, presenting a new mode of sculpture that changes according to environmental conditions. More importantly, from Isobe’s perspective, this development heightened viewers’ awareness of the ever-changing natural environment.

In the summer of 1969, during the televised broadcast of Apollo 11’s moon landing, Isobe held an event where he released a parachute sculpture from a hot air balloon in front of a screen installed in Central Park. The experience evidently led Isobe toward seeing Earth’s place in the cosmos even more objectively than the audience attending the public viewing had. Later that summer, at the Avant Garde Festival on Wards Island, Isobe and the cellist Charlotte Moorman rode in a hot air balloon, another example of his ongoing endeavor to engage with atmospheric currents through personal, physical experiences.

A significant turning point in Isobe’s involvement with environmental issues came on April 22, 1970, when he participated in the first nationwide Earth Day as a member of New York’s Environmental Action Coalition (EAC). Isobe not only designed the New York event’s logo and posters (now in the collection of the New York Public Library), but also designed and produced a massive air dome on the north side of New York’s Union Square, taking up a city block and obstructing vehicle traffic. Numerous members of the public entered and exited the space, inflated with air from blowers, from the pedestrian-only street and took part in lively discussions about environmental issues.

Senator Gaylord Nelson, who spearheaded Earth Day, drew inspiration from the antiwar movement, while also emphasizing Earth Day’s educational aspects with the aim of broadening its support base. This contributed to the EAC’s initiatives, such as publishing newsletters aimed at young people, which continued after Earth Day. Meanwhile, Isobe met with Ian McHarg, the author of Design with Nature and a key figure in the shaping of Earth Day’s principles, for an interview series titled “Forerunners Who Open Up America’s Future” in the Japanese magazine Kenchiku Bunka. In autumn of 1970, Isobe enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his master’s thesis, Feasibility Study for Development of the “Therapeutic Community,” focusing on environmental planning for Hart Island, home to the headquarters of the Phoenix House drug rehabilitation facility. Isobe’s goal was not merely to raise ecological awareness, but also to focus on research and practical application aimed at building new social frameworks.

Since returning to Japan in 1973, Isobe has continued to offer land-use recommendations to governmental agencies based on ecological surveys of various regions, including an advisory role in the planning of Kansai International Airport. Preparing a Natural Resource Inventory involves filling out multiple sheets of extensive and detailed ecological data and information on cultural resources in the target area and superimposing them to arrive at proposals for optimal land use in the region. Essentially, a Natural Resource Inventory serves as a database of regional resources designed to foster a mutually beneficial relationship between the local community and its environment.

In 1996, having turned 60 (the beginning of a new life stage in the Japanese tradition), Isobe resumed producing and exhibiting art focused on environmental issues, while also continuing his environmental planning work. Works such as Wind Direction Undefinable, Energy Flow, and Global Warming depict flows of wind and energy with arrows and other symbols on large canvases. From 1997 to 2000, during residencies at art centers in Paris and Bordeaux, he exhibited works based on regional fieldwork. Among them was Vulnerable Region: Île de France, a six-meter-square floor-mounted installation mapping a nuclear waste disposal facility near Paris at 1:25,000 scale. It was exhibited in Paris in 1998, along with its counterpart Vulnerable Region: Tokyo. He also addressed urban environmental issues in The Tokyo “Land at Sea Level Zone” (2007). Displayed on the glass exterior of a museum near the Sumida River, it indicated water levels during past typhoons and predicted future flood levels, understatedly rendering visible the water flows that could potentially result from global warming and natural disasters such as earthquakes, with the aim of raising awareness within the local community. All of these works were created before the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011.

Isobe lived through the end of World War II at the age of ten and grew up in postwar Tokyo, witnessing the transformation of the cityscape as waterways around Tokyo Station were filled with rubble from air raids and converted into roads with heavy vehicle traffic. Over the past quarter century, his work has focused on rendering visible environmental issues relating to urban areas, particularly through his repeated participation in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial in the snow-heavy Echigo-Tsumari region of Niigata Prefecture. Isobe focuses on how the land in this region has been shaped by the Shinano River, and every three years, he has presented works exploring the relationship between changes in the river and the local community. All of these works employ the river basin as a canvas, and make the history and structure of the land’s formation and the flow of elements like wind and water visible through yellow flags and text. The first work, shown in 2000, Where Has the River Gone, used yellow poles to indicate the former course of the Shinano River, which was altered due to the construction of the Miyanaka Dam by JR (formerly the Japan National Railways). Photos comprehensively documenting the project show the old meandering river course marked by yellow poles amid green rice fields, with the straight line of the present-day Shinano River visible in the background. The power lines on the hills above the rice fields, transporting electricity generated by the dam from Echigo-Tsumari to the Tokyo metropolitan area and powering systems such as the Yamanote Line, are also a prominent feature. The Shinano River basin, a source of energy for Tokyo, continues to undergo seasonal water reductions and changes to its ecosystem. In this installation, as in other works, the poles and triangular flags act as signifiers, but it is the experience of visiting from the Tokyo region and walking the land that delivers a deeper understanding of asymmetric relationships between the metropolis and the snow-heavy countryside. This installation at a vast scale was designed to present the current river’s flow, the remembered flow of the former river course (indicated by the flags), and the flow of energy simultaneously. Isobe’s subsequent works also explore multifaceted changes over time in the relationship between communities and the environment. These alterations include segae (agricultural communities’ cooperative modifications of river courses to expand farmland) and dams made with soil from landslides caused by earthquakes. The works shed light on aspects of community-environment relationships that tend to be forgotten over time.

Isobe’s ambitious installations at the Niigata art festival, employing the land as a canvas, as well as his more recent works, all take creation of a Natural Resource Inventory as their starting point. Since the 1970s, whether working as an environmental planner or participating in art festivals, Isobe’s activities have all been based on ecological data derived from inventories, and he makes no fundamental distinction between his roles. If we view a Natural Resource Inventory, composed of symbols, as akin to the score for a symphony or instructions for a piece of conceptual art, then it is open to various interpretations and adaptations. It appears that, looking to the future, Isobe envisions the inventories being utilized in diverse ways not only by their creators but by a broad spectrum of users.

Naoko Seki is Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University. As a curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1993-2020), she was involved in the organization of exhibitions including Yuki Katsura: A Fable, Yoko Ono: From My Window, LandscapeーYukihisa Isobe: Artist-Ecological Planner, and Kishio Suga: Situated Latency, as well as themed exhibitions including Moderns by the Sumida River, Weavers of WorldsーA Century of Flux in Japanese Modern/Contemporary Art, and The Potentiality of Drawing. She is a contributor to several books, including Politics of Exhibition (Suiseisha), Museums in the Blues: Reconsidering Displays and Collections (Suiseisha), and Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind (Tate Modern).