See This: Susumu Shingu’s Dynamic Sculptures, on View at the Japan Society in New York

As published in The New York TImes, June 12, 2025

Left: Susumu Shingu’s “Birth of Rainbow” (2021) at 565 Broome Street in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. The sculpture will be among the works on view during a Japan Society tour and talk with the artist on June 18. Right: Shingu’s “Stream of Time” (2013), which will be featured with other hanging works in the Japan Society’s galleries.Credit...Left: Nathan Shapiro. Right: photo: © Chiaki Yukioka/Ichigan Company

For much of his six-decade career, the artist Susumu Shingu has made sculptures that interact with nature. When his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, “Susumu Shingu: Elated!,” opens at the Japan Society on June 20, visitors will encounter “Silent Water” (2024), which comprises two rotating aluminum-and-stainless steel polygonal hemispheres powered by water collected from a garden pool in the museum’s foyer — a nod to Shingu’s early water-powered creations for Expo ’70, the first world’s fair to be held in Osaka. More lightweight works, made from wire, cloth and carbon fiber, are suspended in the galleries, requiring only a slight breeze to make them move. Born in 1937, the youngest of five boys, Shingu grew up in the wake of World War II outside Osaka, where his childhood was “full of nature,” he says, but lacking in toys. He and his brothers had to use whatever they could find to make their own fun — an experience he links to his desire to find just the right material for his sculptures today. For those who want to see Shingu’s pieces in the wild, they can also be found as far afield as Athens; Taipei, Taiwan; and Japan’s Susumu Shingu Wind Museum, his outdoor sculpture garden in Sanda, in Hyogo Prefecture, where he’s based. “Susumu Shingu: Elated!” will be on view from June 20 to Aug. 10, japansociety.org.