Word: osaka
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Workers in the yards of the Osaka Shipbuilding Co. intently watched the initial trials of one of the most curious craft ever launched. Floating in the lee of two massive unfinished cargo ships, the contraption was shaped like a midget's pagoda with a giant's spoon balanced across the pinnacle. On cue, a small motor inside the bright yellow and white plywood superstructure began pumping sea water into the bowl of the spoon. As the bowl filled, it dipped down until, with a splash, it dumped 26 gallons of water back into the bay. Empty, the lightened...
...Watch. At 31, Shingu is among Japan's most important young artists-and Osaka's shipyard is his workshop. The floating mobile is one of the six nearly identical sculptures that Kenzo Tange, the designer in charge of Osaka's upcoming Expo '70, has commissioned him to provide for the fair's Lake of Progress. "Shingu's mobiles are never ponderous or solemn," Tange says, "but always as they should be: great fun to watch." Many others obviously agree. For their pavilion at the world's fair, Japan's gas companies have...
...Born in Osaka, the artist was encouraged to take up painting by his father, a businessman who was also a Sunday painter. Shingu studied oil painting at Tokyo University of Arts, and in 1960 went to Rome's famed Academia di Belle Arti. For months he devotedly copied early-Renaissance masterpieces. Then abruptly he turned abstract, eventually took up mobiles because they can be placed anywhere, indoors...
...Sake of Japan. Still in Rome in 1966, he served as a sightseeing guide for a visiting Japanese industrialist, Kageki Minami, president of the Osaka Shipbuilding Co. Minami admittedly knew nothing about art, but metalwork was his business. When he saw the mobiles in Shingu's Roman studio, he invited Shingu to come back to Japan and live and work in his shipyard, where there would be plenty of welders and painters to help him-to say nothing of unlimited amounts of scrap steel to work with...
...COURSE, as the show reminds us, Buck-minster Fuller did get his Plexiglas and steel dome built at Expo. For the Osaka fair Yutaka Murata plans a blow-up amphitheatre of pneumatic PVC tubes, shaped like a locus of horseshoes. Other inflatables pictured include a dome and a space-capsule-shaped weekend house...