'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: 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 collectiveGUN (Group Ultra Niigata). The innovative work of these artists included a visionary exhibition in central Japan of "formless emissions" organized by Matsuzawa; 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 riverbed of the Shinano River. In Tomii's reading, Japan becomes a paradigmatic site of world art history, on the periphery but asserting its place through hard-won international contemporaneity.' - from the back cover

Access level

Onsite

Location code
REF.TOR
Language

English

Keywords
Publication/Creation date

2016

No of pages

293

ISBN / ISSN

9780262535311

No of copies

1

Content type

monograph

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