Two concurrent exhibitions in Japan are offering fresh perspectives on the country's modern and postmodern art movements, highlighting previously overlooked female artists and examining the distinctive ways Japanese creators contributed to international modernism. The shows present a comprehensive reexamination of Japanese art history through feminist and postmodern critical frameworks.
Since the 1980s, Japanese modern and contemporary art have become firmly established within the broader historical narrative of modernism's evolution from the late 1800s through the late 20th century. High-profile exhibitions at prestigious venues such as the Pompidou Center in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York have introduced European and American audiences to the creations and ideas of noteworthy Japanese modern artists. These institutions, traditionally serving as keepers of the canonical history of modern art, have helped situate Japanese modern artists' achievements firmly within the mainstream narrative.
Japanese art historians and curators have produced substantial research and exhibitions in recent decades, emphasizing how richly Japanese artists contributed to the international development of modernism in their own innovative ways and on their own terms. Often, they accomplished this by tapping into their own aesthetic traditions or by responding to cultural, social, or political themes related to Japan and Asia.
The Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Toyota, southeast of Nagoya, is currently hosting "Anti-Action: Artist Women's Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan" through November 30. This groundbreaking exhibition highlights the accomplishments of a group of previously overlooked female painters and mixed-media experimenters. The show's title and concept derive from a netlike motif that appears on the exhibition poster, reflecting a wall-mounted diagram showing the names of 14 featured artists and how their thinking and artistic productions related to each other in various ways.
The exhibition is based on research by Izumi Nakajima, an art historian who teaches at Osaka University. Her 2019 book "Anti-Action: Postwar Japanese Art and Women Artists" provides the foundation for the exhibition, to whose development and catalog she contributed. Nakajima coined the term "anti-action" as a response to "action painting," a label first used by American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 to describe the works of paint-flinging abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock.
Rosenberg regarded such painters' canvases as "arenas in which to act," emphasizing the activity of making a painting over producing a particular image. This viewpoint helped fuel the popular notion of the modern artist as a heroic creative genius, typically male. Decades later, feminist and postmodernist critical theory began challenging that idea. Like her feminist and postmodernist counterparts in the West, Nakajima's critique reacts to modern art history's emphasis on male creators, specifically in the Japan-focused part of that narrative.
The "Anti-Action" exhibition celebrates the works of inventive female Japanese modernists. Among them, works by Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) and Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) are probably best known internationally. However, the exhibition offers numerous discoveries, featuring works by artists such as Keiko Akana (1924-98), Saori Akutagawa (later Saori Madokoro) (1924-66), Kazuko Enomoto (born 1930), Fujiko Shiraga (1928-2015), Mitsuko Tabe (1933-2024), and Tsuruko Yamazaki (1925-2019), among many others.
In her paintings, Akana set rock- and bone-like forms against dark color fields, creating atmospheric compositions reminiscent of works that certain American modernists, influenced by surrealism's interest in the subconscious, developed before embracing full-bodied abstract expressionism in the 1940s. Akutagawa and Enomoto worked with sleek, geometric forms, while Shiraga explored her paintings' surface textures and Yamazaki played with multiple dynamic elements in what postmodernists would later call a pastiche approach.
Tanaka, Shiraga, and Yamazaki were all members of the avant-garde Gutai Art Association, founded in 1954, as was Shiraga's husband Kazuo, who famously painted with his feet. Yamazaki also created what may now be regarded as prototypical mixed-media installation works. Tabe was also an experimenter, with "Anti-Action" featuring paintings she made incorporating materials such as asphalt, plaster, bamboo, and ping pong balls.
Meanwhile, at the National Art Center in Tokyo, "Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan, 1989-2010" runs through December 8, featuring works by Japanese and foreign artists from the period immediately following the bursting of Japan's economic "bubble" era. This exhibition calls attention to ways in which both Japanese and foreign artists working in Japan between 1989 and 2010 created art linked to local aesthetic traditions or inspired by Japan-related subjects or cultural trends.
The Tokyo exhibition showcases works like Kenji Yanobe's techno-haunting color photos and futuristic hazmat suits inspired by the 1989 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident and two significant Japanese events in 1995: the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack. Similarly, referring to the environmental degradation that unfolded in Japan during the 1980s as one cost of its bubble-era boom, Noboru Tsubaki's "Esthetic Pollution" (1990) evokes a natural world filled with bizarre, mutant growth.
Tsubaki's large-scale sculpture forms a pair with his similarly monumental "Fresh Gasoline" (1989), one of the standout works in the traveling exhibition "Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties," which from 1989 to 1991 introduced North American audiences to contemporary art from Japan. These concurrent exhibitions represent a significant moment in the ongoing reexamination of Japanese modern art, offering new insights into both the contributions of overlooked female artists and the distinctive ways Japanese creators have engaged with international modernist and postmodernist movements while maintaining their unique cultural perspectives.
