Things Left as They Are

In the autumn of 1968, at a riverbank in Kobe, a young sculptor named Nobuo Sekine dug a cylindrical hole in the earth — two point seven meters deep, perfectly round. He then placed the extracted cylinder of soil directly beside the hole. The earth and its absence, sitting side by side on the concrete apron of the schoolyard. Neither was transformed. Neither was made. And yet, standing before the documentation of that gesture, something had undeniably shifted in what I understood sculpture to be.

The Weight of Presence

I first encountered a photograph of Phase — Mother Earth in a catalog I found at a secondhand bookshop in Jimbocho, Tokyo, during a winter I spent reading about material philosophy. The image was grainy, almost accidental in its framing. A circle of dark earth, a cylinder of the same earth standing upright, a thin strip of concrete between them. What struck me was not the visual composition — it was the silence the photograph demanded of me, the way it asked me to stop interpreting and simply look.

The world already exists. The task of the artist is not to add to it, but to reveal what is already there.

Lee Ufan, Dialogue with Things, 1972