Born in Tokyo in 1935. While attending Ueno High School, he met Ei-Q and became the youngest member of the Democratic Artists Association. After entering the Tokyo University of the Arts, he began making prints in the 1950s and attracted attention in the early 1960s with his repetitive patch-type motifs. In 1965, Isobe moved to the U.S. and obtained a green card. During his 10-year stay in the U.S., Isobe’s attention turned to environmental planning and ecological issues, and he devoted himself to research and activities in these fields. After returning to Japan in 1974, he resumed his work in the 1990s and has been active as an environmental artist, developing land art that focuses on local communities and the natural environment.

WORK 65-1&2 Elephant-I is one of a series of works with patches that he produced intensively between 1961 and 1965. This piece allows the placement of the badges and other items inside the box to be rearranged and changed. The image of a reproduction of an elephant found in a Dutch magazine disappears as the lid is opened, and instead, a series of badges, clippings, exhibition invitations, and other objects emerge from the box unit as a whole. The intention is to rearrange wholes into parts and parts into wholes, images into symbolic things and symbolic things into images. It is distinct from the mechanical repetition and proliferation of Pop Art, which symbolized the same era, and shows Isobe’s unique abstract repetitive structure.