HONG KONG.- M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, has unveiled the new exhibition Ay-O: Hong Hong Hong, highlighting the practice of Japanese artist Ay-O (b. 1931, Japan), widely known as the ‘rainbow artist’, which opened to the public on Friday, 15 December 2023 in the Cissy Pui-Lai Pao and Shinichiro Watari Galleries. This exhibition inaugurates M+’s new Pao-Watari Exhibition Series, focusing on significant and yet underexamined figures and moments in the history of art and visual culture of Asia. It is also the first solo exhibition of the artist’s works in Hong Kong. The presentation features nearly fifty works by Ay-O from the 1950s to the 2000s, alongside a selection of works by his Fluxus collaborators and counterparts.

Born in 1931 as Iijima Takao, Japanese artist Ay-O adopted the unusual alias, which consists of two kanji characters meaning ‘cloud’ and ‘vomit’. Ay-O grew up during the Second World War, and its immediate aftermath influenced his earlier works. In 1958, he moved to New York and quickly became part of the international avant-garde art group Fluxus. These experiences shaped his firm belief that art should be accessible to all. The rainbow, Ay-O’s signature pattern, captures this universal spirit, and he has taken the motif beyond the canvas to create prints, sculptures, installations, and environments over the last six decades. The exhibition presents Ay-O as a unique artistic figure driven by unflagging humour, curiosity, and imagination.

The first part of the exhibition traces the evolution of Ay-O’s distinct visual language and includes a selection of early works that depict Japan in the post-war reconstruction period. As Ay-O searched for a more progressive artistic environment in New York, he was introduced by Yoko Ono to George Maciunas, often known as the founder of Fluxus, and became a member of this international art collective of visual artists, poets, and composers. Active in the 1960s and 1970s, the group emphasised processes and collaborations, creating groundbreaking works that often question the notion of art. Besides displaying Finger Box, Ay-O’s most well-known contribution to Fluxus, this part of the exhibition surveys his early career and includes selected works from his Japanese Fluxus peers.

The second part of the exhibition features Ay-O’s signature rainbow works. His rainbow patterns capture the colours of the light spectrum visible to the human eye and demonstrate his belief in the accessibility of art. After introducing two iconic rainbow paintings in the first room, the exhibition journeys into Ay-O’s experiments with rainbow gradations, from appropriating iconic works from art history with rainbow hues to applying his motif to readymade objects and various environments.

To mark the exhibition opening, M+ will host an opening ceremony today with the attendance of Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director, M+; curator of the exhibition Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator, M+; and Iijima Hanako, Ay-O’s daughter.

Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director, M+, expresses her excitement for this premiere exhibition of the new series at M+, ‘M+ continues to demonstrate our dedication to exhibiting and championing twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture from Asia. The curious and ebullient spirit that defines Ay-O’s life and work is the perfect beginning to the new M+ series on significant and yet understudied figures and movements in Asian art history. I hope that this new exhibition will resonate with the global audience, raising questions about traditional ways of seeing and stimulating simple joy through the work’s bursting colours.’

Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator, M+, says, ‘Ay-O’s art serves as a proof that experimental and avant-garde can coexist with humour and sensorial pleasure. His rainbow motif has spread over numerous canvases, prints, objects, and environments over more than six decades, demonstrating his indefatigable spirit of optimism and universalism. Our focused retrospective on his career demonstrates how the Asian avant-garde has contributed to and interacted in a global, cosmopolitan space.’

Ay-O

Born in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1931 as lijima Takao, Ay-O is one of the most celebrated artists to have emerged in post-war Japan. He was part of several epochal groups and movements in Japan and the United States, before forging the internationally renowned artistic identity as the ‘Rainbow Artist.’ Ay-O joined the Demokrato Artists Association in 1953 while he was a student in the art department of Tokyo University of Education. In 1958, he moved to New York, and he later joined the Fluxus group through the introduction of Yoko Ono. Ay-O remained active within an international network, which pioneered a number of areas such as intermedia and cross-disciplinary experimentations and performance. By the early 1960s, Ay-O began to develop a unique visual language based on rainbow colours, which would become his signature style and encompass a wide range of mediums including paintings, prints, sculptures, and installation.

M+
Ay-O: Hong Hong Hong
December 15th, 2023 '
Ay-O: Hong Hong Hong is curated by Doryun Chong and assisted by Ariadne Long, Assistant Curator, Visual Art, M+.