The subtitle given to the retrospective of the 60-year career of Osaka-based Michio Fukuoka is oxymoronic: ¡°A Sculptor Who No Longer Sculpts.¡± He used to, but became frustrated and filled with doubt about creativity and so he made sculpture anyway, often about ¡°doing nothing.¡±
Fukuoka¡¯s early career works began underground before they rose to the surface, then became suspended above it. Interested in the biomorphic forms of Antoni Gaudi, he found inspiration in a weathered plaster cast that had been left too long on a shelf. He went to a beach and thrust his hands deep in the sand, filled the holes with plaster and then dug up the forms. The ¡°Sand¡± series was critically received as primitive and grotesque.
His ¡°Miracle Garden¡± pieces of the late 1950s supposedly cast doubt on what constituted sculpture. The horizontally composed and scattered parts of the works rejected the classical conventions of a pedestal and sculpture¡¯s generalized orientation to monumentality and verticality.
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