, known by his pseudonym , was a Japanese artist and writer. He used another pseudonym, , for literary works. A member of the influential artist groups Neo-Dada Organizers and Hi-Red Center, Akasegawa went on to maintain a multi-disciplinary practice throughout his career as an individual artist. He has had retrospective exhibitions at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Chiba City Museum, and Oita City Museum. His work is in the permanent collection at Museum of Modern Art in New York. Artist Nam June Paik has described Akasegawa as “one of those unexportable geniuses of Japan.”

Biography

Early life

Akasegawa was born in 1937, in Yokohama, and moved to Ashiya, Ōita and Nagoya during his childhood because of his father's job. The artist Shūsaku Arakawa was a high school classmate in Nagoya. In the 1950s Akasegawa moved to Tokyo where he attended Musashino Art University in 1955 to study oil painting.

In 1956 and 1957, Akasegawa submitted artworks to the Nihon Indépendant exhibition. Being poor at the time, he “could not shut [his] eyes to the poverty around [him] and engage in the pursuit of pure artistic ideals.” Akasegawa also reported his frustration with the socialist realism aesthetic that predominated at the Nihon Indépendant during these years, He has recalled that toward the end of the 1950s a competition emerged among artists showing at the Yomiuri Indépendant to see whose painting could extend furthest from its surface. The group was founded officially by Masunobu Yoshimura in April 1960 with their group show at Ginza Gallery in Tokyo. The members included, along with Akasegawa, artists acquainted through the Yomiuri Indépendant such as Ushio Shinohara, Shō Kazakura, Kinpei Masuzawa, and Shūsaku Arakawa.

The Neo-Dada Organizers group engaged in a series of bizarre "events" and "happenings" that blended visual and performance art, which the art critic Yoshiaki Tōno labeled “Anti-Art” (Han-geijutsu) and Ichirō Hariu, another critic, deemed “savagely meaningless.” As art historian Reiko Tomii has concisely put it, “the goal of Anti-Art was to question and dismantle Art (geijutsu) as a cultural and metaphysical construct of modern times.” The activities of the Neo-Dada Organizers can be said to conform with what Akasegawa has since termed “creative destruction” in which systematic iconoclasm toward conventions and rules were meant to open possibilities for new forms of art. Such include Anpo Commemoration Event (Anpo ki’nen ebento) which they staged on June 18, 1960, just three days after the death of Michiko Kanba at the storming of the National Diet Building during an Anpo protest. In this group performance, which included prosthetic male genitalia, a fake wound reminiscent of seppuku rituals, and other disturbing imagery, Akasegawa appeared in a head-wrap and a “grotesque, monster-like costume and took massive gulps directly from a bottle of strong shōchū alcohol while dancing around bizarrely and making awful noises.” The exposed, red inside of the inner tube can be said to evoke the image of human biology, in this case a female body. Centered near the top of the composition he placed a hub cab, producing a strange, semi-organic and semi-machinic assemblage. Through the use of discarded industrially manufactured materials, Akasegawa pointed to both the rapid development of postwar Japanese society to which he was responding as well as a “version of the mechanistic woman and the erotic machine, explored by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp earlier in the century.”

Hi-Red Center

In 1963, Akasegawa formed the art collective Hi-Red Center with Jirō Takamatsu and Natsuyuki Nakanishi. The group's name was formed from the first kanji characters of the three artists' surnames: "high" (the "Taka" in Takamatsu), "red" (the "Aka" in Akasegawa), and "center" (the "Naka" in Nakanishi). Hi-Red Center's founding may be traced to a symposium on the relationship between art and political action that occurred November 1962 titled Signs of Discourse on Direct Action, in which all three members participated. The three artists of Hi-Red Center were all featured in Room in Alibi (Fuzai no Heya, July 1963), the Yusuke Nakahara-curated inaugural exhibition of Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo, where they all exhibited works as individual artists. For this exhibition, Akasegawa presented a chair, electric fan, radio and carpet, items symbolic of Japan's growth as a modern, capitalist society, all wrapped in brown paper. This wrapping gesture was intended to provoke new forms of engagement with everyday objects, a curious way of “seeing” objects anew by obscuring them. The piece was also titled Room in Alibi (1963/1995). After dropping the objects they collected and packed them all into a suitcase, placing it in a public locker and sending the key to the locker to someone chosen at random from a phone book. The group would dissolve only a year and a half after its inception, with Akasegawa recounting cryptically that “after Cleaning Event there was simply nothing left to do.” While this project took the more conventional form of an art exhibition than some of their other events, the exhibition itself blurred the boundaries between art and everyday life in ways that engaged the artists’ interest in “direct action.” For five days the exhibition was closed, with two pieces of wood nailed over the gallery door in an X-shaped barricade. The word “Closed” was written on a piece of paper and fastened to one of the pieces of wood. The exhibition remained this way until the final day on which an “opening” event was held. Members of the Tokyo art community as well as others, including Jasper Johns, attended this opening event in which the gallery was revealed to be full of empty cans. Because the cans “enclosed” the universe, including his other inverted cans within that universe, he created a paradoxical situation in which the cans “contained” each other simultaneously. This Bundle of Events was sold as a crumpled bundle of paper tied together by rope. The announcement was delivered to several close friends in a cash envelope sent through the postal service. The announcement itself was a 1,000-yen note reproduced in monochromatic colors on the front with relevant information regarding the exhibit on the back. Thereafter, he used printed sheets of the copied note as wrapping paper to wrap a variety of everyday objects for a series of artworks called Packages.

Akasegawa's note was first discovered by the Japanese authorities during a raid on the houses of members of the radical leftist group Hanzaisha Domei (League of Criminals). He was charged with the crime of "copying" (mozō), i.e. the simulation of currency, which was a lesser charge than actual counterfeiting, but nonetheless quite serious.

In August 1966, Akasegawa's initial trial and numerous appeals began; the entire process would last until 1970. Here, the evidence exhibited during the thirty five minute review turned the courtroom into a kind of gallery space.

The case also produced the 1,000-Yen Note Incident Discussion Group, where intellectuals and artists could discuss the questions raised by the trial and the strategy of Akasegawa's defense. The case hinged on two difficult questions: first, whether Akasegawa's model thousand-yen note constituted "art," and second, whether that art was protected free expression and therefore not a crime. Ultimately, the court decided that the note was in fact art, but that producing that art also constituted a criminal act. In June 1967, Akasegawa was found guilty and given a lenient three-month suspended sentence. He appealed twice but exhausted his final appeal when the Supreme Court of Japan ruled against him in 1970. This Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note (1967) project was a playful, law-abiding response on the charges of which he had just been convicted. These activities arose from jokingly likening odd urban phenomena to conceptual art gestures, such as stairs leading to an entrance that had since been removed. By this liberation of the urinal, Duchamp “consequently fills up with freedom also his own head. The title objet was born under this condition of reciprocal liberation.” Through this reciprocal liberation, art and ordinary life permeate each other through their conventional divide.

In January 1986, Akasegawa and his collaborators, Terunobu Fujimori, Shinbo Minami, Tetsuo Matsuda, Tsutomu Ichiki, and Joni Hayashi, met with Geijutsu Shincho editor Takeshita Tachibana to announce the formation of a new group: Rojō Kansatsu Gakkai (Street Observation Society), abbreviated as Rojō. The group combined its members’ individual affinities with “modernology,” a term coined by Wajiro Kon and Kenkichi Yoshida in their Kogengaku (Modernology). As such, Rojō broadened the scope of inquiry to incorporate Akasegawa's interest in Thomassons into the broader context of modern Japanese life.

Akasegawa was fond of old cameras, especially Leicas, and from 1992 to around 2009, he joined Yutaka Takanashi and Yūtokutaishi Akiyama in the photographers' group Raika Dōmei, which held numerous exhibitions.

Fiction, Manga, and Other Pursuits

As "Katsuhiko Otsuji," he received the Akutagawa Prize in 1981 for his short story, "Chichi ga kieta" (Father Disappeared).

Death

Akasegawa died on October 26, 2014, in Tokyo, aged 77.

Works

<!-- Paintings and Sculptures -->

<!-- Exhibitions -->

Publications

  • Obuje o motta musansha (オブジェを持った無産者). Tokyo: Gendai Shisōsha, 1970.
  • Tuihō sareta yajiuma (追放された野次馬). Tokyo: Gendai Hyōronsha, 1972.
  • Sakura gahō gekidō no sen nihyaku gojū ichi (桜画報・激動の千二百五十日). Tokyo: Seirindō, 1974.
  • Yume dorobō: Suimin hakubutsushi (夢泥棒：睡眠博物誌). Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin, 1975.
  • Chōgeijutsu Tomason (超芸術トマソン). Tokyo: Byakuya Shobō, 1985. Revised: Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1987. . English translation: Hyperart: Thomasson. New York: Kaya Press, 2010. .
  • Tōkyō mikisā keikaku (東京ミキサー計画). Tokyo: Parco, 1984. Reissue: Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1994. .
  • Rōjinryoku (老人力). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1998, . Reissue: Chikuma Shobō, 2001, .

References

Bibliography

  • Profile by SCAI The Bathhouse.
  • Exhibiting Fluxus: Mapping Hi Red Center in Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde at The Museum of Modern Art
  • SFAQ Review: “Hi-Red Center: Traces of Direct Action” at the Shoto Museum, Tokyo. (San Francisco Arts Quarterly)