Does a Bicycle Have a Soul?

Fumio Yoshimura finds one in wood.

In a studio wedged between the Hopkins Center and the heating plant, Fumio Yoshimura has painstakingly rendered from wood such ordinary objects as a tomato plant, a saxophone, a motorcycle, a hotdog stand, fish, pea pods, and bicycles. After spending a decade at the Col- lege as a professor in the studio art department, Yoshimura returned to New York, but not before the Hood Museum honored him with a retrospective last spring.

Yoshimura tells people that he makes the "ghost" of an object. His wooden Honda motorcycle, in the words of author and admirer

Kate Millet, is "an idea of a motorcycle, ripe with humor and affection and boundless admiration for what it celebrates, an apotheosis of a motorcycle."

It is also astonishing craftsmanship.

Japan-born Yoshimura (left) uses wood to find the "true essence " of a bicycle.