Art: Shingu will blow you away

MICHELE HEWITSON braves the elements to see what a kinetic traveller can do with fair winds or foul.

There's a wind warning in place, the Waitemata is looking choppier by the minute, and the mode of transport to the art gallery is a nine-person rubber ducky. You don't usually have to drag me screaming to see modern art but, despite that cute name, the ducky is taking on the swell with a macho bravado that has us shrieking with the hysteria born of true terror. There's nothing like suffering for art.

This, we feel, is taking things too far. Still, it's somehow fitting that it should be this way on the day we're to visit Japanese artist Susumu Shingu at his temporary address - Browns Island (or Motukorea). Minutes after we arrive the skies open and this open-air gallery is sodden within seconds.

It's all grist to the quietly spoken Shingu's artistic mill given that he is a sculptor whose works require the elements, wind and water, to come alive.

He has major pieces at prime public sites throughout Japan, Europe and the United States. His list of friends and supporters includes big names like designer Issey Miyake and Jiri Kylian, choreographer and artistic adviser to the much lauded Nederlands Dans Theatre. But for the next year Shingu is an artist whose business-card might simply read: Travelling. Which is the reason the artist who doesn't like to talk about money - the project has involved "endless" amounts of sponsorship cash - and who you assume could well afford a five-star hotel is happy enough to take cover under a high-tech tent while a gale lashes this barren little island.

Shingu, his wife Yasuko, the six assistants who travel with them, and New Zealand project manager Cyril Wright are here to put up Wind Caravan, a work made up of 21 wind-driven sculptures first exhibited in a paddyfield in Sanda, near Osaka, in Shingu's homeland.

After Browns Island has had its two weeks of fame as an art gallery in the harbour, the artist and his assistants will take the show to the intense cold of Finland, where they will assemble it on a frozen lake for two weeks. In April, Shingu will go in search of the wind patterns of Morocco. Then it's Mongolia in July and the sand-dunes of Brazil in December.

You have to ask why such a successful sculptor seeks isolation and discomfort. And why he asks that people have to make such an effort to view his work. Because it's worth making such small sacrifices, Shingu says, to learn something more about a planet that, "I was born on and live on - and I don't know anything about." For a sculptor whose tools are as much air and water as the lightweight aluminium and sailcloth from which Wind Caravan is constructed, it seemed "natural" to find out more about the earth by travelling to unknown places.

It's as much of a learning curve for the artist as it is for those who may well be getting their first exposure to kinetic art. And it is, as much as anything, Shingu's abiding curiosity about what makes other cultures tick that brings him to places like Browns Island. New Zealand was chosen not just for its aesthetic or cultural possibilities: Shingu likes to go where he has friends and on a visit last October to discuss a proposal for a water sculpture for the Viaduct Basin he made plenty.

You can see why. Though home is a hexagonal tent, Shingu and Yasuko manage to make it a haven from that unpredictable Auckland spring weather. It feels homely. Yasuko offers coffee and chocolates - and there are socks hanging out to dry from the tiny tent window. They eat sushi for lunch off a storage container doing service as a dining table. Shingu, at 63, sits with his wife on his knee, they're like teenagers. This is as about as cosy as it can get in a near gale.

And Shingu has never minded a bit of wind. It helps to make his point.

Wind Caravan is an environmental statement in that Shingu would like us to think about the idea of harnessing wind energy as an alternative power source. And he is making a statement about protecting the resources of the Earth: the only trace of Wind Caravan left behind will be photographs and video. He wants us to appreciate the natural environment as much as we enjoy the art that he's placed there temporarily. We're all in this together.

As the Italian architect Renzo Piano has written: "When I contemplate one of Shingu's sculptures I feel I'm participating in its creation. Watching and waiting for the right moment as the sculpture moves makes me feel that I have contributed to creating a piece of art."

Still, he is the artist. The sailcloth, buffeted in the wind, is making bright yellow spinning patterns against a brooding purple and grey sky.

Why yellow, we ask, when Sanda was white and Finland will be blue?

"You don't like the colour?" he demands. "You tell me."

Watching that clear yellow tumble through the air like some joyful acrobat, you can't help but agree that it's pretty well perfect. And you can hardly complain about a bit of wind making you suffer for art. Three days after we left the island, Shingu was blown off a ladder - he flew through the air - and fractured his spine, though he is expected to recover well.

It might give his work a new twist: on the irony of a wind sculptor being blown about like one of his own works.

* The public opening of Wind Caravan, originally planned for Saturday, will now be on November 11 (but you are still welcome to visit the island). Shingu's public lecture at the Auckland Art Gallery will now be on Friday, November 10, at 7 pm.