NEW YORK, NY.- Japan Society Gallery is presenting Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s, the first full-scale exhibition focusing on the radical experiments of Japanese artists in the 1960s. Centering on Matsuzawa Yutaka and art collectives The Play and GUN (Group Ultra Niigata), the exhibition charts their contributions toward disrupting and “dematerializing” existing artmaking conventions in the global postwar era. Radicalism in the Wilderness showcases the artists’ revolutionary, boundary-defying conceptual works from the decade, which expanded the definition of “visual art” through language, performance, mail art, land art, and political art. The exhibition draws extensively from institutional and private holdings, as well as from the personal collections of the artists.

The exhibition is curated by New York-based independent scholar and curator Reiko Tomii, in collaboration with Yukie Kamiya, Japan Society Gallery Director, and is based on Tomii’s award-winning book, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016).

“The uniqueness of Japanese postwar art movements, including the Gutai group of the 1950s and Mono-ha of the 1970s, has received attention internationally. However, the unconventional artistic practices of the 1960s that emerged between these two movements still await fuller attention. Thanks to Dr. Tomii’s enlightening study on the rich artistic and conceptual output of Japanese artists of that period, which had been long overlooked, there is now a foundation for understanding the linear trajectory and diverse expression of postwar and contemporary conceptual art in Japan, which was the gateway to the global art scene,” remarked Kamiya.

Throughout the 1960s, the imaginative and innovative works by Matsuzawa, The Play, and GUN figuratively and literally explored the concept of “wilderness.” From the remote landscapes and settings selected for many of their performances and conceptual works, notably far outside metropolitan Tokyo, these artists strategically positioned themselves at the vanguard of a new global movement in radical experimentalism by seeking the theoretical foundation of their work outside conventional artmaking and the institution of art. The irreverent and playful conceptual experiments of these artists were informed by and responded to the complex social, political, and cultural issues of the 1960s, such as the Apollo Space Program, Vietnam War, and international student protests.

“1960s Japan is an exciting place in the study of postwar modernism. The state of international contemporaneity was embodied by many strains of practices found not just in Tokyo but also in outside regions, which I call the ‘wilderness,’ where artists devised alternative strategies departing from the mainstream and metropolitan modes of contemporary art. Significantly, these artists achieved global relevance by drawing on their local contexts, although that was barely recognized at the time,” added Tomii.

Taken together, the bodies of work by these artists bridges national and transnational art histories, deconstructing a Eurocentric point of view, and plays a crucial role in establishing the concept of international contemporaneity as the new, post-object- based paradigm for postwar art.

By reflecting their local environment in their conceptual works, these artists overcame their physical distance from Western art centers, and created works that resonated with their global contemporaries, including On Kawara and Yayoi Kusama, as well as Gilbert & George, Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner, Stanley Brouwn, and Yoko Ono.