Modern Sculpture

In 1920 the Constructivists Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner issued their Realistic Manifesto, arguing that sculpture is not just a matter of materials and technique but a way of expressing space, with time as its fourth dimension. In 1968 the Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine dug a cylindrical hole in the ground and packed the earth he removed into a cylinder of the same shape; this Phase—Mother Earth is considered the first work of Mono-ha. In Taiwan, Yuyu Yang proposed "landscape sculpture" before the 1970s, stressing the bond and interplay between art and people; one example is Advent of the Phoenix, the huge steel work painted bright red that stood in front of the Republic of China pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. The Juming Museum's Constant Form—Sculpture as Method borrows the eye of topology, asking which relations stay the same when a form is stretched, bent, or compressed, and it counts the visitor's route and viewing distance as part of the work.

Walk all the way around the work and notice how it stands on the floor, leans on a wall, or takes up the space; then find the spot where it looks most different.

From another spot, at another distance, does this still look like the same work?