Inspired by a recent spate of international exhibitions of the work of the Gutai group, this issue focuses on the contributions of the group and associated currents towards conceptualism, object-centred practices and informel in post-war Japan.
The issue opens with Yotam Zohar’s account of the current Gutai exhibition at the Guggenheim, New York, one of the most significant retrospectives of the group’s work ever staged, and certainly one of the largest to be held outside Japan. This is followed by James Jack’s survey of the oeuvre of photographer Anzai Shigeo, focusing on Anzai’s interpretive and documentary responses to the work of 1960s and 1970s artists, in particular members of the mono-ha. Cecile Laly exposes the origin of these experimental artistic and photographic practices in Japan with a discussion of the seminal theoretical and practical contributions of the Koga review, also offering an insight into the collaborative exhibition and publishing activities of 1930s Japanese artists’ groups that would later provide a model for Yoshihara Jiro in his formation of Gutai. Majella Munro offers a less laudatory appraisal of Gutai’s activities, through discussion of the angst that their participation in the nationalistic, capitalistic Osaka Expo’ 70 incited in their fellow avant-gardists. John Held Jr., curator of a recent Gutai exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute, contributes a comprehensive scholarly bibliography of primary and secondary sources on Gutai, in a variety of languages, based on his own critical reading in the field: an invaluable resource for readers looking to pursue their research of Gutai further.
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