Innovative artists in 1960s Japan who made art in the “wilderness”―away from Tokyo, outside traditional norms, and with little institutional support―with global resonances.1960s Japan was one of the world's major frontiers of vanguard art. As Japanese artists developed diverse practices parallel to, and sometimes antecedent to, their Western counterparts, they found themselves in a new reality of “international contemporaneity” (kokusaiteki dojisei). In this book Reiko Tomii examines three key figures in Japanese art of the 1960s who made radical and inventive art in the “wilderness”―away from Tokyo, outside traditional norms, and with little institutional support.These practitioners are the conceptualist Matsuzawa Yutaka, known for the principle of “vanishing of matter” and the practice of “meditative visualization” (kannen); The Play, a collective of “Happeners”; and the local collective GUN (Group Ultra Niigata). The innovative work of these artists included a visionary exhibition in Central Japan of “formless emissions” organized by Matsuzwa; the launching of a huge fiberglass egg―“an image of liberation”―from the southernmost tip of Japan's main island by The Play; and gorgeous color field abstractions painted by GUN on accumulating snow on the riverbeds of the Shinano River. Pioneers in conceptualism, performance art, land art, mail art, and political art, these artists delved into the local and achieved global relevance. Making “connections” and finding “resonances” between these three practitioners and artists elsewhere, Tomii links their local practices to the global narrative and illuminates the fundamentally “similar yet dissimilar” characteristics of their work. In her reading, Japan becomes a paradigmatic site of world art history, on the periphery but asserting its place through hard-won international contemporaneity.

Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan

Arts & Photography

Tomii, Reiko

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

The MIT Press

Since the 1950s, many Japanese artists have made their homes and careers in New York––some for enhanced exposure to the international art world or to challenge themselves to take their artwork in new directions, and others to escape restrictions faced in their native country. This fascinating book presents work by 33 important New York–based Japanese artists, ranging from young, emerging talent such as Misaki Kawai and Hiroki Otsuka to established luminaries such as Yoko Ono and Ushio Shinohara. These diverse artists work in a variety of media––including video, painting, fashion, architecture, sculpture, performance, drawing, photography, and sound.
Making a Home features a portfolio selection of the images, and essays situate the artists and their work within the broader themes that predominate Asian and international contemporary art. With a biography and bibliography on each artist––as well as a critical biography of Yayoi Kusama that reexamines her early years in New York––this handsome book also explores Japan Society’s pivotal role in supporting the careers of contemporary Japanese artists in New York.

Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York

Shiner, Eric C.

Japan Society

Surveys the fifty-year career of the avant-garde artist Ushio Shinohara. This catalogue, accompanying the exhibition of the same title at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz (August 29 through December 16, 2012), examines the fifty-year career of Ushio Shinohara, an indispensable player in the field of global contemporary history. Born in Japan in 1932, Shinohara was an enfant terrible of the Tokyo avant-garde art scene in the late 1950s with his “action art.” During the 1960s, he went on to invent such signature series as Boxing Painting, Imitation Art, and Oiran. After his move to New York in 1969, he continued with his versatile image-making endeavor, with Motorcycle Sculpture and drawings of street scenes, among other series. Taken together, this volume narrates a story of the inventive, imaginative, and skillful image-maker that is Ushio Shinohara.

Shinohara Pops!: The Avant-Garde Road: Tokyo / New York (Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art)

Ikegami, Hiroko

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Books by Tomii, Reiko