Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible

The life and work of Leo Amino (1911–1989) represent what historian Mae Ngai might call an “impossible subject” of the history of American sculpture—at once visible and invisible, inside and outside, recognized and unrecognizable. Rather than simply rendering the artist within the framework of this received history, this exhibition approaches Amino and his legacy through his own fascination with the question of vision as a philosophical problem of internal and external relation. Amino’s sculpture invites us to look again at the historical avant-garde in the United States. It asks us to look again at what makes art American, Asian, or Asian American. More than a blueprint for the revision of an art historical canon, this exhibition presents an opportunity to recall and renew our ways of seeing. 
 
Born in Taiwan under the auspices of Japanese colonial rule and educated in Tokyo, Amino immigrated to the United States as a young man in 1929. Disillusioned with both Japanese and American nationalist traditions after World War II, he felt himself an outsider among the New York School of painters and sculptors who came to represent abstract expressionism as an exceptionally American phenomenon. He found a measure of freedom among the exiles and refugees of Black Mountain College, where he could speak to Josef Albers’s notion of art as “the revelation and evocation of vision.” Pursuing further implications of the relational problem of figure and ground, Amino embraced light and color as primary elements of sculptural composition. His innovation of cast plastics in 1945, the first use of the medium in the United States, led him to explore transparency as a tool for inquiry into the sensible.

Amino sought to capture the intimacy between the act of seeing and the thing seen. His early works in wood and wire reveal forms unfolding within forms as latent potentialities for deconstruction, negation, and rearticulation. His later “refractional” sculptures articulate light and color through transparent and translucent space, opening onto an optics of encounter, interpenetration, and absorption. These geometrical reductions represent not so much a search for purity through austerity as a way to bring into focus what poet and critic Fred Moten might call “phenomenology’s exhaust”—the nearly invisible beauty of that which would escape recognition.

—Genji Amino