Dancing Haniwa

Haniwa figures—hollow clay sculptures placed around burial mounds in ancient Japan—captivated Saito for their strange formal properties: roughly human in proportion but reduced to their absolute minimum, the features summarily indicated, the bodies cylindrical and thick. The dancing haniwa presents one of the most animated examples of the form, the figure's raised arms and bent posture caught in permanent arrested motion. Saito likely found in these ancient objects the oldest Japanese precedent for his own modernist reductions.