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https://doi.org/10.37050/wpc-co-01_05
Copy to Clipboard. Add italics as necessaryCite as: Reiko Tomii, ‘Thinking Operationally: Collectivism in Modern Japan and Its Contemporary Evolution’, in Thinking Collectives / Collective Thinking, ed. by Eva Bentcheva, Annie Jael Kwan, and Ming Tiampo, Worlding Public Cultures (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 59–76 <https://doi.org/10.37050/wpc-co-01_05>
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Cover design: Studio Bens
Cover design: Studio Bens

Thinking OperationallyCollectivism in Modern Japan and Its Contemporary EvolutionReiko Tomii

Abstract

Reiko Tomii traces the evolution of Japanese collectivism since the 1960s. From art groups connected to dantai, to postwar shūdan and performative networks, she proposes the notion of ‘operation’ to describe artists’ social labour, alongside ‘expression’ to demonstrate how strategic alliances forged modern and contemporary art infrastructures. Through theory and historical examples, she argues that collectivism merges aesthetic and social practice in Japanese modernisms.

Keywords: collectivism; Japan; expression; operation; strategic alliances; dantai collectivism; kōi; shūdan collectivism

The past has cast a long shadow over the present in the formation of multiple modernisms.1 One salient example is collectivism in modern Japan, which dates back to the late nineteenth century and has continued to thrive up to the present day. In this overarching story, collectivism in different guises serves as a fundamental driving force in forging a modernism — and then a contemporary art — in Japan that is at once locally shaped and globally relevant.2

The study of collectivism in Japan must begin with an acknowledgment that the artist is a social being as much as Beginning of page[p. 60] an aesthetic one. That is because in this land of collectivism, from its inception, artists’ group activities have been essential both for advancing new art and for building new art ecology. In this locale, despite earlier signs of local modernism in Edo Japan,3 the modern institutions of art — such as the museum, the exhibition, and even the very definition of art itself (bijutsu) — had to be constructed practically from scratch, mostly in reference to the West. In this context, the group activities of bijutsu dantai (meaning ‘art organizations’ and frequently shortened to dantai) enabled artists to straddle the two domains, that of ‘expression’ and that of what I call ‘operation’, which respectively represent the aesthetic/intrinsic and the extra-aesthetic/extrinsic aspects of art. Put simply, dantai collectivism functioned as a strategy through which artists worked innovatively as both artistic beings and social beings contributing to the aesthetic advances and the expansion of infrastructure.

To codify this fact and study the artist’s social engagement in prewar Japan as an integral part of art historical study, I have proposed to capture the artist’s labour in two forms: expression and operation. Whereas ‘expressions’ typically take place inside the studio, ‘operations’ concern making their works (i.e., expressions) public and, where necessary, building systems to stage and sustain their activities. This latter labour, operation, enables the artist to reach their ultimate goal: to communicate their expressions to society. To undertake their operations, the artist could not be confined to the studio, but must go outside it. Based on this observation, I define collectivism as ‘strategic Beginning of page[p. 61] alliances (primarily) of artists motivated to seek and create alternatives to existing options, be they artistic/expressive or social/operational or both’. These definitions decisively locate the agency of change with the artist, ensuring a bottom-up perspective on historical narration. Moreover, as outlined below, these definitions have proven to be effective in analysing the history of collectivism beyond prewar Japan.

Dantai Collectivism in Prewar Japan

In Japan, collectivism has existed in the form of art organizations since the late nineteenth century. However, dantai collectivism was inspired by the government salon Bunten, which was inaugurated in 1907 as the Ministry of Education Art Exhibition. Frustrated by the salon’s official aesthetics, dantai rose to assert their aesthetic positions by creating self-governed exhibition platforms to counter the Bunten, which was an open-call, juried, annual salon, then the sole public platform for practising artists. For example, Nika-kai (Second Section Society), founded in 1914 by modernist oil painters, was the first to go against the Bunten. It articulated its opposition by using the term zaiya (literally ‘in the wilderness’). Notably, Nika and other dantai in the wilderness mimicked the format of the official salon: its open-call exhibition was equipped with its own jury that would uphold its aesthetic standards and award prizes accordingly.Beginning of page[p. 62]

At first glance, this may not seem so different from the relationship between the French Salon and the Impressionist Exhibition held between 1874 and 1886. However, in contrast to the Impressionist Exhibition, which was an independent exhibition and did not continue beyond its eighth instalment, Nika, thanks to its salon format, morphed into an institution unto itself and became a foundational element of the art establishment, despite its initial anti-establishment stance. Because of its eclectic embrace of moderate modernism, it saw a number of dissatisfied vanguard members and associates splinter off to form their own dantai to embrace their own brand of expression, including the Fauvist-inflected Dokuritsu Bijutsu Kyōkai (Independent Art Association) established in 1926. Nika, Dokuritsu, and scores of other dantai were established in the prewar years, with a majority never going out of existence (albeit with brief wartime pauses). They have continued to this day, both in the fields of yōga (Western-style painting) and nihonga (Japanese-style painting). In this sense, the development of dantai-based modernism was not so much linear as cumulative. In aggregate, their co-existence led to the formation of a massive conservative establishment, called gadan, or ‘painting platform’. The gadan was carried into postwar Japan and still maintains an enduring, if diminished, presence today.Beginning of page[p. 63]

A Reassessment of Dantai

The twin ills of dantai, and by extension the gadan, amounted to stagnant expressions and feudalistic operations. This was evident from early on. Especially in the immediate postwar years, gadan dominance was felt to be uncreative and authoritarian against the overall sentiment of the country embracing democratization and modernization as its urgent mandate after its devastating defeat in the Pacific War. The progressive segment of the art world attempted to reform the dantai-based art world in a few directions. These efforts, outlined in the next section, opened a space for gendai bijutsu (literally ‘contemporary art’) that is contemporaneous with new tendencies globally, such as gestural abstraction, minimalism, conceptualism, and performance art. Largely because gendai bijutsu gained prominence, the negative assessment of dantai has been inscribed into Japanese art history.

A question lingers, however. Does it then follow that dantai collectivism made no positive contribution to the formation of modernism in Japan beyond representing the conservative genealogy of expression? A new perspective can be introduced by expanding on the sociological concept of ‘intermediate organizations or institutions’ (chūkan dantai). Intermediate organizations are a type of free and voluntary association situated ‘in between’ (i.e., chūkan) the state and the individual to make vital contributions to advancements in politics, the economy, journalism, and Beginning of page[p. 64] knowledge production by ‘transforming each member’s interests into something more public-orientated’.4

It should be noted that in the prewar decades, the infrastructure for art (museums, galleries, schools, and discourse) was at best nascent. To fill the gap, dantai not only hosted annual salons, but also performed multiple tasks, selling works from their salons (mimicking the Bunten salon), issuing newsletters and journals, and offering formal and informal classes, including kenkyūjo (research institutes). Granted, neither dantai founders nor their members necessarily had the public good at the forefront of their minds when operating their salons. Still, as Japanese artists negotiated their treacherous paths in the formation of modernity, their self-interest and professional interest as collectively represented by dantai overlapped with a broader public interest in that their stable presence in society helped to acclimate modern art practices in Japanese society, which would in turn strengthen the popular support for modern art.

In this respect, the non-linear evolution of artistic expressions in the dantai ecology might even have been beneficial. The rearguard expression of dantai did serve public interests by offering the audience a slow and incremental exposure to modernism that ended up providing a steady diet of familiar or favourite styles among the general public. What is considered ideal in modern art history — constant advances in expression that frequently entail the rejection of previous forms — could have been confusing to audiences not accustomed to Western-imported modern Beginning of page[p. 65] art. Because major dantai represented a spectrum of styles, ranging from academic naturalism to Impressionism to Surrealism to abstraction, the audience could take its time getting to know each of them, rather than experiencing them as a series of rapidly changing stylistic fashions. If the general taste, understanding, and knowledge of modern art grew slowly, that was the time necessary for the universal idea of ‘modernism’ to take root in Japan, where it lacked a centuries-long history of oil painting or a tradition of Western-style art institutions. Thus, borrowing from art historian Kitazawa Noriaki, who called the government salon Bunten an ‘invisible museum’,5 we may call the whole constellation of dantai salons another invisible museum that educated the Japanese public on modern art. Strangely enough, it was a museum that was renewed with a fresh crop of works with each annual exhibition.

Correctives to Dantai Collectivism: Shūdan Collectivism

In postwar Japan, correctives to dantai collectivism were attempted with varying degrees of success. The idea of ‘independent exhibitions’ that have neither jury nor awards had already been broached in prewar Japan, but it became a reality most memorably with the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, instituted in 1949 by the Yomiuri newspaper company. It went on to serve as a veritable headquarters of the avant-garde in the Anti-Art (Han-geijutsu) strain, whose scandalous success eventually led to its demise in Beginning of page[p. 66] 1964.6 Kashi garō (rental galleries) also played a role. Their rise in the 1950s and proliferation in the subsequent decades, particularly in Tokyo, enabled emerging artists to organize their own solo exhibitions to gain public attention.7 A few newly instituted competitive exhibitions — such as the Shell Art Award and the open-call section of the biannual Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan hosted by the Mainichi newspaper company — enabled young artists to make an official entry into the art world.

These institutional developments helped the younger artists’ operations (that is, exhibition activities) and the mainstreaming of vanguard practices under the rubric of gendai bijutsu. However, the bottom-up spirit of seeking alternatives was strong among artists who desired to explore new possibilities in expression. Collectivism remained a powerful tool for them in the form of shūdan. A shūdan is a collective with a small membership that mainly focuses on member exhibitions. In prewar Japan, they had generally subsisted in the margins of the gadan and frequently regarded as a subspecies of dantai. However, shūdan have been retroactively recognized as ‘pioneers of gendai bijutsu’8 in the 1970s. Postwar shūdan that followed their prewar predecessors then paved the way for gendai bijutsu through their vigorous pursuit of radical experimentalism.

The 1950s saw two major manifestations of shūdan collectivism that brought about innovations. One was Gutai, a hybrid of dantai and shūdan under the leadership of Yoshihara Jirō, a Nika member, in Osaka.9 The other was Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), an interdisciplinary Beginning of page[p. 67] cooperative in Tokyo, which thrived in its technology-inspired collaborative projects and exhibition-concerts.10 The 1960s was a decade of short-lived collectives that mushroomed throughout the country. Those emerging in the frenzied Anti-Art milieu included Neo Dada (initially ‘Neo Dadaism Organizers’), Group Ongaku, Hi Red Center, Zero Dimension (Zero Jigen), and Kyūshū-ha. In the latter half of the decade, when the more conceptual tendency of Non-Art (Hi-geijutsu) took hold, collectivism was enlivened by a number of regional shūdan — most notably, Group ‘I’ of Kobe, GUN (Group Ultra Niigata), and The Play of Osaka — that imaginatively found their sites of operation outside Tokyo, the centre of the art world in Japan.11

Merging of Expression and Operation in Kōi (Acts)

One common thread that runs through the expressions and operations of these inventive collectives is their growing interest in the use of kōi, or ‘acts’, the local terminology for performance art. While a handful of individual performers — Shinohara Ushio, Kazekura Shō, Itoi Kanji (aka Dada Kan), and Mizukami Jun — come readily to mind as legends, collectivism was a pivotal engine of performance art, due to its potential for scale through collaboration made possible by the power of the multitude, when the institutions for gendai bijutsu were still in formation and no institutional framework for performative works existed.Beginning of page[p. 68]

The performative practitioners’ departure from conventional modes of expression (painting and sculpture) frequently occurred hand-in-hand with their departure from customary modes of operation (i.e., exhibition). Many act-orientated collectives, for example Zero Dimension, notorious for their nude performances, took to the streets to stage their acts, while some subsequently eschewed urban space altogether and ventured into rural areas. In brief, all of them aspired to devise alternative expressions on alternative platforms.

Operationally speaking, what happened here was the merging of expression and operation, as artists decisively left behind exhibition-based collectivism. Take, for example, the iconic 1964 act of Cleaning Event (officially known as Be Clean! and Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area).12 In this work, there was no separation of ‘inside the studio’ and ‘outside the studio’, ‘making’ and ‘display’, ‘expression’ and ‘operation’. The same applies to GUN’s memorable Event to Change the Image of Snow in 1970.13 In principle, their expressions (street cleaning and snow painting, respectively) required members and associates to undertake operations outside their studios, thereby bringing their expressions directly to the public, in the streets, and the snow fields. Here, their operations were their expressions, and vice versa.

Another new factor that entered the equation was publicity, that is, the space of the media. This direction was consciously spearheaded from the mid-1950s onward by Gutai, whose action demonstrations for media outlets Beginning of page[p. 69] were at once original and strategic,14 and slightly later by Shinohara Ushio, whose violent Boxing Painting captured the imagination of the American photographer William Klein and the Japanese novelist Ōe Kenzaburō, among others. In pursuit of the ‘avant-garde road’ that was financially ‘rewardless’ (mushō), Shinohara was eager to court publicity in the mass media as his reward.15 Along with Shinohara, Hi Red Center, Zero Dimension, and later GUN found a site of operation in the media, collaborating with such photojournalists as Hanaga Mitsutoshi and Hirata Minoru to have their photographs taken and published in photo-illustrated magazines and news weeklies.16

By 1970, shūdan collectivism had fundamentally reshaped the practice and outlook of what art could be, helping to secure the realm of gendai bijutsu within Japan’s art world. At the same time, new practices of gendai bijutsu revealed the state of contemporaneity with the global directions of dematerialization that manifested differently in various locales.

Collective as Community

With the diversification of shūdan collectivism and novel practices continuing to develop toward 1970 and beyond, a new terminology is useful in further refining our understanding of postwar collectivism. The word I propose is kyōdōtai, which I borrow from the critic Yoshida Yoshie, who used it to characterize the Nirvana Commune that gathered around the immaterial conceptualist Matsuzawa Beginning of page[p. 70] Yutaka as ‘a community [kyōdōtai] that penetrates the darkness’.17 Yoshida’s use was tinged with the atmosphere of lightness and possibility of the hippy era around 1970, which liberated the term from its previous negative association with the prewar and wartime feudalistic hierarchical community. To retain this sense, I define ‘community’ here as a communal entity with a far more horizontal and open relationship than dantai, often characterized by collaboration and networking.

It must be remembered that an aspect of ‘community’ in a broader sense was always an operational necessity of collectivism, dantai or shūdan. Gutai’s solidarity, Neo Dada’s partying at the leader Yoshimura Masunobu’s residence called ‘White House’, and Hi Red Center’s penchant for anonymity within the group’s activism all bear witness to it. This last even found a real-life application as it morphed into the Model 1000-Yen Note Incident Discussion Group to support member Akasegawa Genpei’s criminal trial from 1963 to 1974, making it an exceptional community.

With Hi Red Center as a predecessor, a new community collectivism that emerged in the late 1960s is often steeped in kōi or other unconventional mediums, making the communal formation an integral part of their expression as much as operation. There are three key collectives that meet this set of criteria. The Play, an Osaka-based collective, was known for its annual summer projects in landscape settings from 1968 to 1987.18 The Psychophysiology Research Institute, a kōi-centred mail-art collective Beginning of page[p. 71] to create an ‘invisible museum’, existed for only six months in 1969–70 by design, pioneering the packaging of act-derived information as a work of art.19 And the Nirvana Commune revelled in its secretive gatherings of kōi held at Matsuzawa’s Sensuiiri Meditation Platform in central Japan and organized a series of global-scale exhibitions via mail-art from 1970 onward with a vision of ‘world uprising’.20

The community these collectives created was expansive, with a network of members and other affiliates who worked together for a shared goal. In the case of the two communities linked by the mail-art relationship, the goal of producing a mail-art museum or exhibition may be considered an extension of mounting a physical exhibition. With The Play, however, its large-scale summer projects merged expression and operation — be it a trip on a Styrofoam raft down the Yodo River from Kyoto to Osaka (1969) or a month-long wait for lightning to hit a pyramid-shaped scaffold they built on a mountaintop over ten summers (1977–86). Its decision-making process was democratic: all members were encouraged to propose a project idea and the logistics were formulated through discussion. In executing each project, all members contributed their diverse skillsets, ranging from graphic design to carpentry to construction, in order to bring it to fruition. The Play was not a typical artists’ collective, as a majority of its members were non-artists. Furthermore, to realize its projects, the group was helped by willing non-members from ordinary walks of life (including a professor of oceanography,Beginning of page[p. 72] a fishermen union chief, Styrofoam companies, and landowners, to name just a few). Aside from the regular members, the group’s roster varies from project to project, the flexibility of which has enabled them to endure to the present. In fact, in their official records, together with the current core members, all these past members, affiliates, and collaborators constitute their communal membership roster.

~

This is a quick overview of collectivism in modern Japan and its repercussions in the formation of gendai bijutsu. What it offers to critical global art history is manifold. Although this narrative is specific to one locale, the need for institution building was shared in many locales in both Western and non-Western regions. Foregrounding the artist’s agency in operation is but one way to revisit the histories thus far narrated, often by prioritizing expressions. The terminal point of the above narrative is the 1970s, but within Japan alone, the story continues with a new set of collaborative entities, as the desire for alternatives never wanes even when the infrastructure appears more established than, say, one hundred or even fifty years ago. In fact, the status quo almost always had gaps for imaginative and ambitious artists to exploit. One example from contemporary art in Japan is the controversial Chim↑Pom, a collective of artists and non-artists, which fits the definition of ‘community’ above but upholds a far bigger global perspective Beginning of page[p. 73] and scope of social engagement than its art-historical predecessor, The Play, half a century ago.21 At the same time, the communal spirit and the merging of expression and operation can typically be observed in documenta fifteen of 2022, in which ruangrupa, a community-orientated collective from Jakarta, orchestrated a platform for individuals and collectives to present their versions of communal projects under the banner of lumbung (a communal rice barn in Indonesian). In other words, what took shape in Japan in much more modest forms of social engagement in a few postwar decades has a distant resonance across history and geography. If collectivism was a forceful driver of modernism in Japan, it continues to be a forceful driver of contemporary art, which we are observing at this very moment.

As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, the past casts a long shadow on the present. However, with collectivism, the shape of things now seems much clearer, not only with the benefit of historical hindsight but also with our broadened and globalized view of the planet.

Notes

  1. For the state of multiple modernisms scholarship, see, for example, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms, ed. by Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg (Routledge, 2021) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367140854>, especially, Terry Smith, ‘Prologue: Art History’s Work-in Pro(re)gress — Reflections on the Multiple Modernities Project’. ↵
  2. I have examined the history of collectivism in modern and contemporary art in Japan in stages. I first laid out a schematic overview of postwar vanguard collectivism in ‘After the “Descent to the Everyday”: Japanese Collectivism from Hi Red Center to The Play, 1964–1973’, in Collectivism After Modernism, ed. by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 44–75. I reexamined the conundrum of dantai by introducing the notion of ‘operation’ in ‘Introduction: Collectivism in Twentieth-Century Japanese Art with a Focus on Operational Aspects of Dantai’, Positions, 21.2 (Spring 2013), pp. 225–67 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2018256>. I introduced a contemporary perspective to frame prewar and postwar collectivism in ‘Localizing Socially Engaged Art: Some Observations on Collective Operations in Prewar and Postwar Japan’, FIELD, 7 (Spring 2017) <https://field-journal.com/issue-7/localizing-socially-engaged-art-some-observations-on-collective-operations-in-prewar-and-postwar-japan/> [accessed 14 March 2025]. I unified these studies in ‘Collectivism in Japan Reconsidered: Exploring Its Operational DNA in the Spirit of DIY in the Prewar and Postwar Periods’, Between Collectivism and Individualism: Japanese Avant-Garde in the 1950s and the 1960s, exh. cat. (Zachęta — National Gallery of Art and The Japan Foundation, 2021). ↵
  3. The most notable example is ukiyo-e prints in Edo Japan, which reveal the evolution of print culture as part of the development of popular culture and mass audience. In natural history, Federico Marcon traces how the rise of modern natural history in Edo Japan was incorporated into Western natural history in Meiji Japan in his The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2015). ↵
  4. This definition of chūkan dantai is taken from Senkan-ki Nihon no shakai shūdan to nettowāku: Demokurashī to chūkan dantai [Social Organizations and Networks in Interwar Japan: Democracy and Intermediate Organizations], ed. by Inoki Takenori (NTT Shuppan, 2008), pp. ii–iii. ↵
  5. Kitazawa Noriaki, ‘Kindai Nihon bijutsu no seiritsu: Bunten no sōsetsu’ [The Formation of Modern Japanese Art: The Beginning of the Bunten], in Nihon yōgashō-shi [The History of JADA], 1st edn (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1985), p. 222. ↵
  6. For a brief overview of postwar Japanese art, see Doryun Chong et al., Tokyo, 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, exh. cat. (Museum of Modern Art, 2012). For a focused view on Anti-Art and the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, see William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013). ↵
  7. For rental galleries, see Reiko Tomii, ‘“A Test Tube” of New Art: Naiqua and the Rental Gallery System in 1960s Japan’, Afterall, 47 (Spring/Summer 2019). ↵
  8. Gendai bijutsu no paionia-ten [Pioneers of Contemporary Art Exhibition] held at Central Art Museum in 1977 was a major undertaking to survey ‘young artists’ of prewar Japan, which included thirty-six collectives. Among them were a few salon-based and long-lived dantai such as Bijutsu Bunka and Jiyū Bijutsu, but the majority were small collectives. See its catalogue published as a special issue of Furusawa Iwami Bijutsukan geppō [Furusawa Iwami Museum monthly newsletter], 25 (1977). ↵
  9. For Gutai’s collectivism, see Ming Tiampo, ‘Gutai Chain: The Collective Spirit of Individualism’, Positions, 21.2 (2013), pp. 383–415 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2018292>; and Reiko Tomii, ‘An Experiment in Collectivism: Gutai’s Prewar Origin and Postwar Evolution’, in Gutai: Splendid Playground, exh. cat., ed. by Ming Tiampo and Alexandra Munroe (Guggenheim Museum, 2013). ↵
  10. For Jikken Kōbō, see Miwako Tezuka, ‘Jikken Kōbō and Takiguchi Shūzō: The New Deal Collectivism of 1950s Japan’, Positions, 21.2 (2013), pp. 351–81 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2018283>; and ‘Experimental Workshop and Tradition: An Avant-Garde Play Pierrot Lunaire by Jikken Kōbō and Takechi Tetsuji’, Art Journal (Fall 2011), pp. 64–85 <https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=2349> [accessed 15 March 2025]. ↵
  11. Many individual and collective performers are discussed in KuroDalaiJee, Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan = Nikutai no anākizumu: 1960 nendai Nihon bijutsu ni okeru pafōmansu no chika suimyaku (2010), ed. by Jason M. Beckman (Leuven University Press, 2023). ↵
  12. For a detailed description of this performance, see Tomii, ‘After the “Descent to the Everyday”’, pp. 46–47. ↵
  13. For a detailed description of this performance, see Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016), pp. 5, 126–30. ↵
  14. See Tiampo and Munroe, Gutai: Splendid Playground. ↵
  15. See Hiroko Ikegami and Reiko Tomii, Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York, exh. cat. (SUNY Press, 2012). ↵
  16. For these photojournalists, see Minoru Hirata: Action, the 1960s, exh. cat. (Taka Ishii Gallery, 2013) and Mitsutoshi Hanaga 1000 (1000BUNKO, 2017). See also Performance Histories from East Asia: 1960s–1990s, exh. cat., ed. by Victor Wang (David Roberts Art Foundation, 2018). ↵
  17. Yoshida Yoshie, ‘Matsuzawa Yutaka: Yami o tōtetsu suru kyōdōtai’, Bijutsu techō, 360 (November 1972), pp. 5–11; in English as ‘A Community That Penetrates the Darkness’, trans. by Reiko Tomii <https://artplatform.go.jp/resources/readings/R202228> [accessed 15 March 2025]. ↵
  18. For The Play, see Tomii, chapter 3 in Radicalism in the Wilderness. ↵
  19. For Psychophysiology Research Institute, see Reiko Tomii, ‘Psychophysiology Research Institute (1969–1970): Envisioning an “Invisible Museum”’, in Charting Space: The Cartographies of Conceptual Art, ed. by Elize Mazadiego (Manchester University Press, 2023), pp. 158–81. ↵
  20. For Nirvana Commune, see Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness, pp. 153–56, 171; and Shimada Yoshiko, William Marotti, and Peter Alexander van der Meijden, Niruvāna kara katasutorofī e: Matsuzawa Yutaka to kyokūkan no komyūn = From Nirvana to Catastrophe: Matsuzawa Yutaka and his ‘Commune in Imaginary Space’, exh. cat. (Ota Fine Arts, 2017). ↵
  21. For Chim↑Pom’s activities, see Ushiro Ryūta, Katsudō geijutsu ron [Theory of Action Art] (East Press, 2022). ↵

Bibliography

  1. Chong, Doryun, et al., Tokyo, 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, exh. cat. (Museum of Modern Art, 2012
  2. Frigeri, Flavia, and Kristian Handberg, eds, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367140854>
  3. Gendai bijutsu no paionia-ten [Pioneers of Contemporary Art], exh. cat. published as a special issue of Furusawa Iwami Bijutsukan geppō [Furusawa Iwami Museum monthly newsletter], 25 (1977)
  4. Hanaga, Mitsutoshi, Mitsutoshi Hanaga 1000 (1000BUNKO, 2017)
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  6. KuroDalaiJee, Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan = Nikutai no anākizumu: 1960 nendai Nihon bijutsu ni okeru pafōmansu no chika suimyaku (2010), ed. by Jason M. Beckman (Leuven University Press, 2023)
  7. Marcon, Federico, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
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  9. Minoru Hirata: Action, the 1960s, exh. cat. (Taka Ishii Gallery, 2013)
  10. Noriaki, Kitazawa, ‘Kindai Nihon bijutsu no seiritsu: Bunten no sōsetsu’ [The Formation of Modern Japanese Art: The Beginning of the Bunten], in Nihon yōgashō-shi [The History of JADA], 1st edn (Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1985)
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  13. Tezuka, Miwako, ‘Experimental Workshop and Tradition: An Avant-Garde Play Pierrot Lunaire by Jikken Kōbō and Takechi Tetsuji’, Art Journal (Fall 2011), pp. 64–85 <https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=2349> [accessed 15 March 2025]
  14. ‘Jikken Kōbō and Takiguchi Shūzō: The New Deal Collectivism of 1950s Japan’, Positions, 21.2 (2013), pp. 351–81 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2018283>
  15. Tiampo, Ming, ‘Gutai Chain: The Collective Spirit of Individualism’, Positions, 21.2 (2013), pp. 383–415 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2018292>
  16. Tomii, Reiko, ‘After the “Descent to the Everyday”: Japanese Collectivism from Hi Red Center to The Play, 1964–1973’, in Collectivism After Modernism, ed. by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 44–75
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