Nojima Jiro野島二郎

Nojima Jiro (野島二郎) was born in Osaka in 1938 and grew up in Minoh, at the green northern edge of the city, where he still lives and works today. He studied sculpture at the Kyoto City University of Arts, began with ceramic sculpture, and showed early work at the Nika Exhibition in Tokyo.

In the 1970s he became part of the Kansai avant-garde. He was selected for the 3rd Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition (1972), exhibited in「Gendai Bijutsu '73→'74」in Kyoto, held solo exhibitions at Art Core in Kyoto (1975, 1977), and appeared at the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art's「art now '76」. In November 1975 the art journal Bijutsu Techō named him among 78 artists of "the new generation of Japanese contemporary art."

Critics of the time singled out what would become his lifelong signature: the cast illusion. A Kyoto Shimbun reviewer described paired forms of hemispheres, cylinders and cubes, half in polished marble or black granite and half in cast aluminum or bronze, their male and female molds exchanged, so that hard materials appeared to soften, fold and yield. The eye insists it cannot be; the material insists it is.

From the 1980s, his work moved into public space. The city-emblem monument before Minoh City Hall (1983), the stainless ring『Kūkan 21』at the Minoh fire department (1985), works for Kurashiki's machikado sculpture exhibition (1987), and, at the invitation of Mizuno's president, 『Flame』(1992): a 16.5-metre column of artificial crystal threaded with optical fibre, rising through the four-storey atrium of the Mizuno headquarters in Osaka, said to be the only monument of its material in the world. After the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake he made 『Wind, Seven Colors』(1995), a rainbow of stainless steel and glass at the Kobe Nunobiki Herb Garden, one panel engraved so the disaster's lessons are not forgotten. In later years his light sculptures went to sea, installed through the entrance halls and staircases of the Shin Nihonkai ferries SUZURAN, SUISEN, AZALEA and LAVENDER, crossing the Sea of Japan nightly.

He has remained deliberately independent, belonging to no artists' association, while carving, in parallel with the monuments, a quieter gallery of impossible things in wood: barbed wire, draped cloth, a split paprika, the Hand of Buddha, a Gundam. He served as advisor to the historic Kyoto bronze foundry Denrai Kōbō, whose corporate mark he designed, and taught as a lecturer at an art university.

In 2024, in his late eighties, he set down his chisels and took up a pencil. The resulting series, Support one another, in which rings of drawn cylinders hold one another up and none can stand alone, was first exhibited in spring 2025: an exhibition of sculpture in which, for the first time, there was no sculpture at all.

His largest spatial work is a house. Among the rice terraces of Bukit Jati, near Gianyar in Bali, he designed Villa Dandan Bukit: natural materials, open rooms under timber roofs, an infinity pool held out toward Mount Agung. He spends the Japanese summer there, and for the rest of the year the villa welcomes guests through Airbnb, where it is rated 4.97 and named a Guest Favorite.