Plane Sculpture 平面彫刻

Kazuo Okazaki has produced art objects in a variety of media from the end of the fifties to the present. In Japan art that does not fit into conventional categories like painting or sculpture is referred to as an "object." Many of Okazaki’s works are quite small, taking the form of things that are an ordinary part of everyday life like light bulbs, dolls, and coffee cups.
Okazaki made this piece in his late twenties and it was shown in the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1959. The drooping surface, held at the edges and pierced cut into numerous strips, looks like the tanned skin of an animal. Its uncanny form, created by welding thin pieces of brass and copper to steel, has an ambiguous appearance that is difficult to describe. It gives the viewer an uncomfortable feeling that cannot be clearly defined. This illusionistic effect, like a trompe l'œil painting, and the contradictory title, using the word "plane" to describe sculpture, a three-dimensional art, are products of the Anti-Art movement of the time. Here we have a foretaste of the methods that the artist would adopt later, transforming or reversing the nature of familiar things to illuminate hidden areas of our everyday sensibility.