Artist Isamu Noguchi was born on November 17, 1904, in Los Angeles, USA. His Japanese name was Isamu Noguchi. He passed away on December 30, 1988.
He was the son of poet Yonejiro Noguchi, but his father had already returned to Japan by the time of his birth, and he grew up as the illegitimate child of his mother, Leonie Gilmore. He moved to Japan with his mother at the age of two. However, Yonejiro already had a Japanese wife at the time, and Leonie and Isamu lived together in a house in Chigasaki.
At his mother's request, he moved to the United States at the age of 13. After graduating from high school, he entered Columbia University's pre-med school. Meanwhile, he began attending night school at the Leonardo da Vinci School, where his talent as a sculptor blossomed. He subsequently dropped out of university to devote himself to his career as an artist. In 1927, he won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he devoted himself to training under sculptor Constantin Brancusi. This experience strongly influenced him by modernist abstract expression, and after returning to Japan, he exhibited a series of works. However, he failed to gain public acclaim, and during this time, Isamu continued to travel Asia, Mexico, and Europe, searching for his path as an artist.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, calls for the exclusion of Japanese people began to rise in the United States. Seeing this, Noguchi organized the "Mobilizing Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy" in 1942. He also volunteered to enter an internment camp for Japanese Americans, where he was treated by the internees as an American spy. Ultimately, Noguchi felt he had no place there either, and left the camp in despair.

After the war ended, in 1946, he exhibited his works in the "14 Americans" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This work garnered acclaim, and Isamu gradually began to receive commissions. He also fell in love with Yoshiko Yamaguchi, a successful actress in Japan, and married her in 1951. He established a studio in Kamakura and, under the guidance of Kitaoji Rosanjin, produced unglazed works. During his stay in Japan, he also worked on numerous architectural designs, including the interior design of Keio University's Faculty Hall and the bridge at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. His "AKARI" lighting sculpture, based on the Gifu lantern, later became a series, and Noguchi frequently visited Gifu to present new works.

After his divorce from Yamaguchi in 1958, Noguchi moved his base of operations to New York. Around this time, he also began to pursue his idea of "sculpting the earth," creating a garden at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris from 1956 to 1958. He continued to design numerous gardens, including the 20,000-square-meter Billy Rose Sculpture Garden, located next to the National Museum of Israel, in 1960.

In his later years, Noguchi began to divide his time between the United States and Japan. He established a studio in Mure, Kagawa Prefecture, and energetically produced sculptures using granite and basalt excavated from the area. He also founded the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in New York in 1985, and the following year was selected to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. He subsequently received numerous art awards, becoming one of the world's leading sculptors in both name and reality, but passed away in 1988 due to heart failure. Moere Numa Park, which he had begun designing at the request of Sapporo City during his lifetime, finally opened in 2005, 17 years after his death.