This exhibition marked Shusaku Arakawa’s second solo exhibition at the museum, following his 1979 exhibition Shusaku Arakawa. It focused on The Mechanism of Meaning, a collaborative project developed with his wife, Madeline Gins, beginning around 1963. Comprising 81 paintings together with drawings and architectural models, the exhibition created an experimental environment that challenged viewers’ habits of thought and bodily perception, prompting a reconsideration of the world as structured through meaning and language.
Also featured was the then-ongoing Epinal Project, presented through scale models as well as partially full-scale constructions that visitors could physically experience. By engaging directly with these environments, viewers became active participants in Arakawa and Gins’s exploration of perception, cognition, and human existence.
The Sezon Museum of Modern Art holds the complete set of The Mechanism of Meaning (127 works), as well as works such as At the Window (1968), which was exhibited in A View of Japanese Contemporary Art, the inaugural exhibition of the Seibu Museum of Art.