Active and relatively successful as a young painter in the post-war avant-garde, Isobe appeared to abandon his artistic practice when he moved to New York in 1965 and began a career in urban and ecological planning.
However, Isobe maintained his passion for the visual arts and began creating two-dimensional works again in the 1990s that now employed a graphic vocabulary of scientific signs and forms.
[1] The group, which advocated for artists' creative liberty, was active from 1951 to 1957, and included notable figures like On Kawara, Ay-O, Toneyama Kojin, and Izumi Shigeru.
[2] Isobe began studying painting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1954, while continuing to frequent Ei-Q, a particularly important influence on the young painter.
[3] Curator Motoi Masaki has stated that the young artist struggled to make sense of their differing approaches, which were diametrically opposed: the university, with its "worship of technical mastery", ran counter to Ei-Q's belief in abandoning conventional modes of expression.
Forced henceforth to forge his own path, Isobe fixated upon a shape that would occupy his paintings for the following years: the first works in his wappen, or coat of arms, series appeared in 1961.
[1] Despite his new professional turn, Isobe maintained an interest in new forms of creation, and was particularly fascinated by architectural structures that employed wind and air, like the Montreal Biosphere designed by Buckminster Fuller in 1967.
[6] In 1970, as part of an Earth Day celebration, he created Air-Structured Dome, a large installation in Union Square, in which visitors could enter and move about.
[1] He studied under the landscape architect Ian L. McHarg, who was a precursor of the environmental planning movement, with a focus on understanding and limiting the human impact on the natural environment.
In 1976, he wrote an article that appeared in Kenchiku Bunka Magazine entitled "Ecological Planning: Methods and Application", which was well received by Japan's architectural community.
"[9] Isobe's large two-dimensional works created in the 1990s, called the Ecological Context series, are dynamic collages, with maps often being used as a starting surface.
Concerning this series, Isobe stated: "Through my work, I hope today to highlight the importance of the relationship between man and his environment through a means able to be read visually, and not conceptually.