Yellow Landscape by Isamu Noguchi 1943
Yellow Landscape, as seen in Figure 1, is a sculpture created by Isamu Noguchi in 1943. It was fabricated shortly after Noguchi decided to voluntarily enter Poston, Arizona's Japanese-American internment camp in 1942, where he would stay for seven months to enhance the living conditions for those incarcerated there through design and artistic interventions (Hatfield, 2017). Noguchi sculpted this surrealist depiction of a Japanese Zen garden featured in Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein comprising delicately balanced carved wood, and fishing weights on a string to express his interest in translating scientific ideas of space, time, and quantum mechanics into tangible forms. Those seemingly random compositions of objects were Noguchi’s attempt to explore fragility, weightlessness and tension - concepts drawn from Einstein’s theories of relativity and unseen forces.
Written by: Coco Zhu
