This site-specific, walk-in “jungle” constitutes Yutaka Sone’s first major artwork since he moved from Japan to LA in 2000. A meditation on the artist’s new home, Yutaka Sone: Jungle Island magnifies Sone’s longstanding interest in the social history of built environments, a theme of his multidisciplinary work. The installation, with a footprint of approximately thirty x fifty feet, comprised four, 1.5-ton, freestanding marble sculptures of notable freeway interchanges in LA (10 and 110, 10 and 405, 110 and 105, and 14 and 5), set within a tropical environment embedded with two winding trails. These “tropics” were created with over three hundred actual tropical plants, including Canary Island date palms, philodendrons, and various tree ferns, with giant birds of paradise to top them off. Sone created the work by taking aerial photographs of each interchange, sketching and videotaping the surrounding neighborhoods, constructing a foam and cardboard model of the data, and translating the model into sculptures with marble artisans in China.
Yutaka Sone: Jungle Island is organized by Paul Schimmel, Chief Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.