Phase of Nothingness - Cloth and Stone

Conceived in 1970 and executed in 1994, Nobuo Sekine’s Phase of Nothingness, Cloth and Stone is elegance suspended. Two stones are connected by a rope. The first is hidden, covered in a cloth that is wrapped around the canvas; the second, visible, dangles in the air. Phase of Nothingness, Cloth and Stone is a stilled metronome, an elemental and experimental space. Along with Lee Ufan, Sekine was a leader of the influential, pioneering movement Mono-ha (School of Things), which emerged in Japan in the late 1960s. Mono-ha artists investigated the properties of unrefined, raw materials such as stone and wood as a challenge to the growing industrialisation of Japan; in these works, they offered an alternative to the country’s seemingly unquestioned submission to Western Modernism. Phase of Nothingness, Cloth and Stone is part of a larger series for which Sekine examined relationships between nature and artificiality: as the artist himself explained, ‘Sometimes, I see a mono very vividly, as if it is magnetically charged. A fresh encounter with an ordinary, everyday mono. This encounter is momentary, shutting down immediately…Here, we have the desire to ‘create in order to see’ and give flesh even to those mono that pass through our selves… To render the invisible visible. To illuminate the world overlooked in everyday life through the language of encounter’ (N. Sekine, ‘Mono to no deai’, Ohara-ryū sōka, September 1969, n. p.).