Chair for the Breeze

大倉侍郎作 「Chair for the Breeze」 欅彫 1973年

The Spirit of Wood: Contemporary Sculpture by Okura Jiro

This work is by Okura Jiro, a conceptual artist and sculptor based in the town of Uji, south of Kyoto.

Okura is known for his minimalist wooden sculptural works made from woods of native trees associated with Shinto and Buddhism. Zelkova (a hardwood similar to elm), used in the sculpture Chair for the Breeze is found in temple architecture; camphor, used in Vessel (next to the tearoom), is an aromatic wood whose trees grow to gargantuan sizes near Shinto shrines. The Appalachian black walnut used for Mountain Lake Screen Tachi, here, and Mu, on the wall next to the tearoom, was harvested only after the performance of a Shinto ritual.

As a young man, Okura spent time studying Zen Buddhism at the nearby temple of Manpukuji in Uji. He found similarities between the repeated chanting of sutras (Buddhist texts) and sitting of meditation in the temple and the repetitive nature of his own artistic practice. Many of his works required infinite hours of carving, polishing, slicing, and coloring wood—time-consuming, mindless processes that felt to the artist almost like meditative practice.

The artist's early works were often large, undulating sculptures of various shapes with beautifully smooth, polished surfaces. In the 1980s, he began taking a less controlled approach, allowing the wood to warp naturally, and slicing, scoring, or boring holes into it. These later works reflect an experimental attitude embracing randomness and accidental effects shared with the avant-garde composer John Cage, with whom Okura collaborated at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia in the early 1990s.