Dancing in the Wind

Workers in the yards of the Osaka Shipbuilding Co. intently watched the initial trials of one of the most curious craft ever launched. Floating in the lee of two massive unfinished cargo ships, the contraption was shaped like a midget's pagoda with a giant's spoon balanced across the pinnacle. On cue, a small motor inside the bright yellow and white plywood superstructure began pumping sea water into the bowl of the spoon. As the bowl filled, it dipped down until, with a splash, it dumped 26 gallons of water back into the bay. Empty, the lightened bowl swung up again, and a brass "sound cone," hanging off the other end of the 15-foot-long arm, began broadcasting a high-pitched whine. "Banzai!" cheered the workmen. "O.K. It will be O.K.," said the contraption's creator, Susumi Shingu, who expresses his love of the wind and the water in such lighthearted abstract mobiles.

Fun to Watch. At 31, Shingu is among Japan's most important young artists--and Osaka's shipyard is his workshop. The floating mobile is one of the six nearly identical sculptures that Kenzo Tange, the designer in charge of Osaka's upcoming Expo '70, has commissioned him to provide for the fair's Lake of Progress. "Shingu's mobiles are never ponderous or solemn," Tange says, "but always as they should be: great fun to watch." Many others obviously agree. For their pavilion at the world's fair, Japan's gas companies have commissioned Shingu to create indoor fountains that will frame a huge new ceramic fresco by Joan Miro.

Born in Osaka, the artist was encouraged to take up painting by his father, a businessman who was also a Sunday painter. Shingu studied oil painting at Tokyo University of Arts, and in 1960 went to Rome's famed Academia di Belle Arti. For months he devotedly copied early-Renaissance masterpieces. Then abruptly he turned abstract, eventually took up mobiles because they can be placed anywhere, indoors or out.

For the Sake of Japan. Still in Rome in 1966, he served as a sightseeing guide for a visiting Japanese industrialist, Kageki Minami, president of the Osaka Shipbuilding Co. Minami admittedly knew nothing about art, but metalwork was his business. When he saw the mobiles in Shingu's Roman studio, he invited Shingu to come back to Japan and live and work in his shipyard, where there would be plenty of welders and painters to help him--to say nothing of unlimited amounts of scrap steel to work with.

Today Shingu and his wife and infant daughter occupy a converted bathhouse in the center of the Osaka yard. Despite the din, he says: "I feel elated working in a wide-open space away from all those small, restrictive ateliers." With help from many deckhands, he assembled his first one-man show in Tokyo last summer.

More than anything else, it is the wind that intrigues Shingu. He finds inspiration in the motion of a cloud, in a blade of grass or a leaf, and he takes long Sunday walks in the woods far from the shipyard. As long as leaves dance in the wind, he is not likely to run out of ideas for mobiles.

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