A leading figure of postwar Japanese contemporary sculpture, Shimizu Kyūbei was also known as the seventh-generation Shimizu Rokubei for his work in ceramics.
The lustrous surfaces of his aluminum sculptures—so sleek that one feels compelled to touch them—and the seamlessness of his welds hardly betray the trace of the hand.
While Kyūbei produced many monumental works of public art, it is often in his smaller pieces that viewers find themselves drawn irresistibly into such minute details.
The defining elements of his works—straight and curved lines, as well as a sense of volume—were likely pursued with a stoic precision in drafting. Yet the finished sculptures show no excess, no wasted gesture; they never reveal the back-and-forth struggle often associated with the process of creation.
During his lifetime, Kyūbei once remarked that aluminum was more reticent than other materials.
It may be precisely this reticence that allowed his works to merge so effortlessly into architectural settings and function naturally as public art, resonating with diverse audiences.
By contrast, in his works as Rokubei, traces of the hand remain present in clay, the fundamental medium of ceramics. Unlike his aluminum sculptures, these pieces do not appear to reject such marks of manual labor.
It seems deliberate that he pursued entirely different approaches under the two names of Rokubei and Kyūbei.
Ordinarily, such a duality of expression might give rise to a sense of dissonance or even insecurity in an artist’s sense of identity.
Yet in the case of Shimizu Kyūbei (Rokubei), one is struck by how naturally he inhabited these multiple worlds at once—a stance that remains remarkable even today.