Mono-ha

Mono-ha, the School of Things, was a Japanese art movement active from roughly 1968 to the mid-1970s, centered on artists including Lee Ufan, Nobuo Sekine and Susumu Koshimizu, who arranged raw, minimally altered natural and industrial materials, stone, wood, glass, steel plate, paper, cotton, oil, directly in relation to one another and to the surrounding space, rather than shaping them into representational or expressive form. Sekine's 1968 work Phase Mother Earth, a deep cylindrical hole dug in the ground beside an identically sized cylinder of the excavated earth, is considered the movement's founding gesture, presenting the material and the space it left behind as equally the work. Influenced by Lee Ufan's own philosophical writing on presence and encounter, drawing on both phenomenology and East Asian thought, Mono-ha rejected the object-making tradition of Western modern art in favor of foregrounding the material's own nature and its relationship to its site, an approach later recognized internationally as a major independent current within postwar installation art.