Stop. Breathe. And get over yourself.

In 1968, like their counterparts world over, Japanese university students were so unhappy with the post-war Japanese growth machine that they rioted and called for a change.

Yes, the Japanese had more money now, but at what cost? The unspeakable horrors of World War II, the humiliating terms of defeat, not to mention the destruction of long-established social ties and safety nets.

While the universities were on lockdown, an art student, Nobuo Sekine, was tinkering around in an abandoned warehouse along with two of his classmates. At Sekine's instigation, they manually dug an 8 1/2 foot deep hole in the ground. They compacted the earth they removed into an 8 1/2 foot tall cylinder, which they placed next to the hole. Onlookers at the site were dwarfed by the massive, solid mound of mud and the black hole beside it.

Sekine presented the cylinder and the hole, a thing and its inverse, as a work of art, Phase--Mother Earth.

Unsurprisingly there weren't too many takers until a few weeks later, when Sekine met the Korean philosopher/ artist Lee Ufan. Lee got it.

In Lee's philosophy, man is not the centre of the universe but a part of it. He is not a creator but merely a part of creation. The very act of expressing oneself is egocentric. A man has to learn to see things as they truly are and not just as they appear to him. Ideally, an artist should do no more than barely manipulate the raw materials/ nature he works with. At most he might call attention to the interdependent relationships between things, including the person who is looking at the things.

Sekine and Ufan were pioneers of what came to be known as the Mono-Ha movement or the School of Things. 

The conceptual art of Mono-Ha was an attempt to sabotage the inexorable rise of a certain vision of modernity.  It did not, however, reject this modernity by turning inward to tradition — there had never been art like this before in Japanese history. 

Instead, it looked outward, drawing upon a combination of Western and Eastern thinkers to put forward a new vision of modernity. Mono-Ha art demanded patience and introspection from its viewer. It was resolutely ordinary, frequently repetitive, and also ephemeral. It was immovable and site-specific, so it could not easily be bought or sold. In short, it was the antithesis of the high-gloss, brand-name assets that were being gobbled up by an increasingly globalised art market. 

Almost fifty years after the protest movements of 1968, a recent letter to the editor of a national newspaper pleaded for an end to economic growth: "Do we have to grow infinitely? Can't there be a point at which we as a society get to say 'enough?'"

At a time when we are bombarded with the message of "More! More! More!" all while engaged in a race to nowhere, the message of the Mono-Ha movement is more relevant than ever: Stop. Breathe. And get over yourself.