Works by Gutai-an association of radical artists founded by Jiro Yoshihara, whose practices included shooting paint onto a canvas with a cannon and plunging through laminated rice-paper screens-can sell for as little as $50,000 and as much as $1 million, according to a sales associate at Hauser & Wirth. Hauser & Wirth, also in New York, had a show of Gutai paintings in September, and Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase, New Paltz, New York, presented “ Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York,” curated by Hiroki Ikegami with Reiko Tomii. L.A.’s Blum & Poe gallery organized an exhibition, “ Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha,” last year, which later traveled to Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. In February the Guggenheim Museum will open “ Gutai: Splendid Playground,” curated by Munroe, now at the Guggenheim, and Ming Tiampo, associate professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa.Įlsewhere, “ Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962,” an exhibition that featured an international array of artists, including Gutai participants, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles this fall.

In November, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened “ Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde,” organized by associate curator Doryun Chong.

Now, however, several important museum and gallery exhibitions are shedding new light on the era. Too little attention has been paid to Japan’s postwar art in the West, with the exception of the groundbreaking 1994 exhibition “ Scream Against the Sky,” organized by the then-director of Japan Society Gallery, Alexandra Munroe, with the Guggenheim Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Japan Foundation, as well as the 2007 show “ Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970” at the Getty Museum. Surprisingly (to the Western audience at least), the art that came out of this period was not solely about destruction, but also about rebellion and self-determination. But Japan’s contemporary-art history is actually far more complex and long-standing, going back at least as far as the end of World War II, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the U.S.

In the West, contemporary Asian art is often perceived as having developed in response to globalization and the proliferation of new art centers around the world over the past ten years.

Art of war 2 opening monologue