Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha

Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha is the most comprehensive study in English to date on the postwar Japanese movement Mono-ha (School of Things), and examines the groups practice in Tokyo between 19681972 at the height of the nations political upheaval against the USJapan Security Treaty, anti-Vietnam War protests and its oil crisis. The Mono-ha artists--who included Noburu Sekine, Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga and Koji Enokura--all distinguished themselves through an aesthetic detachment that, instead of creating things, strove instead to rearrange them into artworks that interacted with the spaces around them. While sharing certain traits with the Land Art and Minimalism movements that were taking place in the United States, and the Arte Povera movement in Italy, Mono-ha was ultimately a rejection of the Euro-American avant-garde and is now synonymous with the beginnings of contemporary art in Japan.