Publications

Yutaka Sone

This catalogue documents three Yutaka Sone exhibitions that took place during 2006; Forecast: Snow, at The Renaissance Society, X-Art Show, at the Aspen Art Museum, and Like Looking for Snow Leopard, at the Kunsthalle Bern.

Chinese-born, L.A.-based Sone's predilection for the impossible and the paradoxical is expressed in very diverse work that has its roots in performance but emphasizes the sculptural.  Landscape and amusement inform an experience -oriented body of work that is cause for reconsidering our relationship to nature.

For several years Sone's varied art practices were all placed in the service of themes inspired by snow. (This includes his stint as the frontman for his rock and roll outfit, The Snowflake Band, which was memorialized in the artist book titled Snowflake produced in conjunction with the Society's exhibition.)  Forecast:Snow at The Renaissance Society presented a body of work the artist developed around the idea of snowflake patterns as blueprints for architectural spaces and psychological states.  The works were set in a wintery forest in the gallery with 100 live pine trees and fake snow.   X-Art Show at the Aspen Art Museum featured Sone's work fusing art with sport, performance, and entertainment. A highlight was a pair of artist-designed giant dice that were flown by helicopter to a nearby ski resort and tossed down the giant half-pipe at Buttermilk Mountain.  In Kunsthalle Bern's Like Looking for Snow Leopard, Sone continued his physical and metaphorical journey toward an unreachable place, creating works based on a personal assessment of landscape.

In addition to extensive photo-documentation of the three exhibits, the book contains essays by Kunsthalle Bern curator Philippe Pirotte on Sone's use of imagined landscape and non-linear time, and Aspen Art Museum curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson on Sone's celebration of the mythology of sport and its fusion with nature.   In addition, Hamza Walker contextualizes Sone's recent marble snowflake sculptures within the histories of both art and science, and Benjamin Weissman, who enjoys skiing with Sone, contributes a delightful text enriching our understanding of the artist's deliberate mix of fiction and reality.