Mono-ha

In October 1968, at Suma Rikyū Park in Kobe, Nobuo Sekine dug a hole in the ground 2.2 meters across and 2.7 meters deep, then took the earth he had removed and shaped it into a column of the same form, standing it right beside the hole. He called it Phase — Mother Earth. Nothing was added, and yet everything there looks different. Setting stone and steel plate down with almost no alteration — keeping the act of making to a minimum, so the relationship between object and object, object and place, shows itself directly — this attitude spread outward from here. Lee Ufan supplied the theory behind it. The name Mono-ha, incidentally, was given from outside; the artists never called themselves that (accounts differ on who coined it, and when). Around the same time, on the other side of the planet, Minimalism was cutting away in a similar direction. Neither side knew of the other, yet working from different first principles, they arrived at the same place.