【Kan Yasuda in Italy vol.3】 Solo Exhibition in Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi

Kan Yasuda’s solo exhibition was held in Assisi, a medieval city in central Italy, for four months from June to October 2005. The venue was Basilica di San Francesco, a World Heritage Site.

Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) was a Catholic abbey who established the Order of Friars Minor and was known for “honesty, poverty, and peace” and “symbiosis with nature”. Saint Francis’s name is also known since the current Pope Francis took his name.

The respectable basilica was erected posthumously in honor of Francis, who had been raised as a saint. The basilica has two stories; a stone coffin that is relic of Saint Francis is enshrined along with an altar downstairs where the entrance is, and fresco paintings that explain the life of Saint Francis are on display on walls upstairs. Exiting out of the basilica, along Francis Preaches to the Birds, a fresco painting allegedly by Giotto di Bondone, the landscape of the Umbria plain is picturesquely there on the right.

Green, yellow, brown and the color of the sky. No artificial or flashy colors are visible. This view represents the aesthetic of Italian people when it comes to landscapes.

Five sculptures of Kan Yasuda were exhibited in the upper and the lower piazzas of the basilica.

SHOSEI was installed in the lower piazza as if welcoming visitors, where a cobblestoned path of beautiful four-colored strips meets. When a visitor goes out of the basilica after viewing the life of Saint Francis through paintings, they would find TENSHO and KIMON on the lawn, ISHINKI on the right, and their eyes would be then drawn to the landscape.

The exhibition was titled as “Loving Life Is Creating Peace.”

This show came to fruition thanks to Father Vincenzo Coli. Father Coli served as the Custodian of the Holy Convent of Assisi from 1981 to 1989 and also from 2001 to 2009. He made an effort to organize “Prayer for Peace” in Assisi in 1986, where Pope John Paul II addressed about 100 representatives from locations in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, who gathered and prayed through their own religious ceremonies.

Father Coli saw Kan Yasuda’s exhibition in Florence and eagerly invited him to hold a show in Assisi. Here is the text by Father Coli in the exhibition catalogue:

The essentiality and the joyful life are the most significant characteristics of San Francesco. I believe that we are able to trace these in the works of the Japanese sculptor Kan Yasuda. These characteristics are deep foundations in the whole metier of Yasuda's art: signs, lines and bursting force. There is a song for life.

Father Coli’s mind was on the same page as Saint Francis and also Kan Yasuda. He was sure that Yasuda’s abstract sculptures would easily go beyond the borders of religions or races.

After the exhibition, Kan Yasuda donated a small work of ISHINKI, and it was installed in the drawing room of basilica.

In 2016, 30 years after 1986, “the 30th World Day of Prayer for Peace” was held again in Assisi, and Pope Francis also attended. Attendees then may have seen and touched ISHINKI.