Shingu: Message from Nature - Hardcover

Pierre Restany is an art critic and author who lives in Paris. Renzo Piano is an architect who lives an Genoa, Italy. Joseph Giovannini is an author, critic, and designer in New York.

Interview with Joseph Giovannini

GIOVANNINI: Id like to start at the very beginning with your student background. What did you study and when did you study? You were a painter originally?

SHINGU: Yes. From childhood, I always loved to paint, and wanted to be a painter. So I studied oil painting in Japan, and when I finished school I wanted to study outside of Japan. That was 1960, and I was twenty-three.

GIOVANNINI: So your undergraduate education was in painting?

SHINGU: Yes, and some art history. I loved early Italian Renaissance painting, especially frescos and mosaics made directly on the wall of the building itself. They're different from framed paintings, which are easy to hang, you can move them. So I went to Italy to study painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. I finished in two years. I also studied anatomy and the history of Italian art, which were very useful later. But I started to lose the ambition to become a painter. Seeing all these masterpieces in Italy, I began to feel that perfection had already been achieved four hundred, five hundred years ago. What contemporary artists were showing in museums and galleries was not so interesting to me. I started to get very doubtful of my future as a painter.

GIOVANNINI: What effect did this have on your work?

SHINGU: First of all, even though I didn't understand a lot of contemporary painting, I was doing some very abstract painting, and the shape in the frame became more and more interesting to me. But I started to wonder why I had to confine these shapes to square or rectangular canvases. So I cut out a shape from the canvas and made a special frame, which was a little bit like a relief, sticking out from the wall. I wanted to show distance in space, so I made more three-dimensional objects.

GIOVANNINI: So you cut out the shapes, you eliminated the frame, you took it off the wall somewhat, and then you gave it contours so that it became a relief of some sort?

SHINGU: That's right. This was 1965. One day I took some pieces outside to photograph, and I hung them from a tree branch. They started to move. It bothered me at first because I wanted to take a picture, but watching them move I saw that if I used certain shapes or mechanisms more suitable to wind, their motions have a more interesting feel of motion.

GIOVANNINI: So it started with an accident; it started just because you were taking a photograph outside.

SHINGU: That's right, exactly. And, of course, in the beginning, I was using very weak material, completely unsuitable for the outdoors. But then I met the president of a Japanese shipbuilding company. I was a kind of tour-guide for him while he was in Rome. He had a rich knowledge of art, so he liked that I took him to the museums and explained all the artwork. He was interested in what I was doing, and he came to my studio and home. He saw my three-dimensional works and he said, "Its interesting that you make these alone, welding steel frames, sewing canvas onto the frame, and making sort of folk art objects." Already, probably as a businessman, he imagined a future for my work and said that if I wanted to make them a more industrial way, he could help. That was 1966, and preparations for Expo 70 in Osaka were beginning.

GIOVANNINI: Could you tell me about the transition from painting to sculpture?

SHINGU: I'd done a group of these painting-sculptures, but very quickly, probably over two or three months. So there was really no transition between paintings and moving sculptures. I followed the shipbuilders advice. At the end of 1966, I went back to Japan, to Osaka. He prepared a studio for me in the middle of the shipyard. It was a revolution for me. I was able to work with the engineer, who would tell me if my ideas were structurally sound, and how to make mechanical drawings. I worked with materials I'd never used before. All of these processes exist outside of art, but became part of how I worked.

GIOVANNINI: So this was the time in which design became an integral part of your process of making sculpture, because you begin with drawings.

SHINGU: Yes, that's right. Before, for instance, if someone asked me the size of the sculpture, I had to measure my sculpture [LAUGHS] because I didn't have a drawing. Also, it was still unusual then to make sculpture specifically for outdoor exhibition. Architects became interested in my work and chose me as the artist to design the plaza of the site of Expo 70.

GIOVANNINI: Did you collaborate with an architect?

SHINGU: No, not yet. I made a floating sculpture, Floating Sound. Each of the six buoys has a giant spoon that tilts as it fills and empties with water. Then a cone-shaped counterweight suspended from the handle of the spoon drops, making a splashing sound.

GIOVANNINI: What happened after Expo 70?

SHINGU: I went to teach at Harvard after that, in 1971. On my first trip to the United States, in 1969, I met Harry Abrams, who published my first book. I also met José Luis Sert, who was then dean of architecture at Harvard. He introduced me to Mirko Basaldella, a sculptor who was director of the Carpenter Center. Mirko didn't like to speak English and was so happy to talk to me in Italian. He said, "Why don't you come to help me teach the students at Harvard?" He died soon after, the same fall I think. But he left kind of a will and compliment: I was invited to be a lecturer in Carpenter Center.

GIOVANNINI: Did you do your own work there as well? You did that wonderful water sculpture in the Carpenter Center. You also did a sound sculpture, as you call it, with students.

SHINGU: Yes, I did a collaboration with students and had a wonderful time. That's my only experience with teaching. I have never taught anywhere since then.

GIOVANNINI: Your early sculpture was very colorful, very shaped, and it seemed, unlike the later sculpture, to have a formal presence without movement, even in photographs. But in your later pieces, is it true that they're more dependent on movement and wind and power?

SHINGU: Yes. At the beginning, shape and color were still very important, but then I became more interested in motion than shape. And now I'm not exactly coming back, but I think my sculpture is becoming more sculptural so that even without motion it has some beauty. But still in all, I'm very flexible. I make sculpture to serve the site, not to serve my style. Or maybe my own style is flexibility.

GIOVANNINI: You have been making sculpture that moves by natural energy for more than thirty years. What fascinates you so much about the movement?

SHINGU: The first time I saw my sculpture moving in the wind a little bit as I intended, it was an incredible joy. It seemed like my sculpture was joined with nature directly. I thought I understood the mystery of the wind. That was a big mistake. I know, because I'm still learning today. But that starting point . . . I cant avoid that excitement of working with powers that don't belong to me, invisible powers that I somehow manage to catch. That's the character of my sculpture; there's always a power outside of my sculpture. The object itself without that power has no meaning. When connected with that power, the sculpture will become alive.

GIOVANNINI: What were the stages of evolution of your work? You were talking about your painting becoming more three-dimensional and the three-dimensional becoming sculptural, and sculpture becoming kinetic.

SHINGU: I'm not interested in calling my work kinetic or sculpture or anything else. I don't even care if people think its art or not. [LAUGHS] Its not that important. When I was studying in Rome, I'd sit on a bench by a fountain, and everything around me had been designed in one period. Artists then worked as painters, sculptors,...