Chapter from 'Katsura Yuki: Protest, Opposition, Victimisation'

During a series of battles following the infamous Manchurian Incident of 1931 three young Japanese soldiers, heavily armed with explosives, scrambled up to an enemy stronghold with the intention of blasting a hole through the barbed wire fence. They came under heavy fire and detonated their explosives, instantly blowing themselves up. Wether the detonation of their explosives was intentional or not, the three young men accomplished their mission at the cost of their own lives. Japanese military leaders where quick to brand these boys as heroes, willing to sacrifice themselves for the Empire. The legend of the Three Brave Bombers (bakudan san’yūshi) rapidly became a national myth, the three boys posthumous media celebrities and visual representations of their act of selfless bravery heavily circulated throughout the Japanese empire.

The story of the Three Brave Bombers neatly encapsulates several key elements of the Japanese military’s development of wartime rhetoric, coupled with the power of the growing mass media.  Self sacrifice, the total submission to the state, the loss of individual identity, and aggressive acts transposed  into acts of bravery in the name of defence appear as the pillars of wartime propaganda. Images and stories of the Three Brave Bombers were reproduced time and time again in books, magazines, theatre, paintings and kimonos throughout the 1930s. Perhaps more disturbingly, the incident signalled the government’s readiness to commodify death and to anonymise the individual in order to unite the people in the war effort. The Bombers became accessible, visual symbols encouraging the nation to give themselves to the state in the name of defence and protection, when in reality the Japanese Imperial Army were attempting to expand their empire through acts of ruthless aggression. In order to achieve their aims, the government needed to further secure in its citizens an active identification with nation, ensuring a nationalistic sentiment that exposed then removed those who wished for a more established sense of individual identity.  

To answer this call, the Japanese government introduced the National Mobilisation Law in 1937, which called on all its citizens to assist with efforts in the Second Sino-Japanese war. The mobilisation law remained in place as Japan entered conflict with America in 1941, where fear of Western  lead modernisation was arguably one of the central driving forces that rallied the people, a fear that had been growing since the end of the nineteenth century. Artists were not exempt from national service, nor were they immune to the fears of foreign modernisation shared by other citizens. A steady stream of Euro-American modernism had been flowing into Japan since the late nineteenth century, and Japanese artist had been quick to adapt to and investigate not only new modes of expression, but also utilise developments in painting technology that were well established in Europe and the US. Yet not all artists embraced the importation of Western artistic ideals, some saw the adoption of foreign  practices as un-Japanese. If artists in Japan felt they had been colonised by the ‘overpowering cannon’ of Western art history, as has been suggested by Kinoshita Naoyuki, then anxieties around loss of traditional artistic identity may have surfaced amongst the many artists groups operating at this time. Yet, whilst  modernism does not necessarily equal modernisation in the context of the West, the teleological categorisation so favoured by Western art history should be used with caution when approaching art that exists as ‘other’ from the solipsistic establishment of Western art history. Seen through the lens of East Asian art history European modernism could be said to be inseparable from Westernisation. 

   In addition to the national mobilisation law, government and military leaders began placing even greater emphasis on the physical and mental fitness of their citizens. It was important for the people to be healthy, strong and ready to fight. Ideas of strength and fitness were inseparable from the state-sponsored images of war, the obsession with physical fitness echoing the socialist realism of the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. The Japanese Government sought total ownership of the body of its people; during a roundtable discussion in 1938 the then Welfare Minister Kido Kōichi declared ‘The body of each single national is not your own, but the property of the state’. It is interesting to note that Koichi would later go on to become the lord keeper of the privy seal, and Emperor Hirohito’s closet confident.  Running in tandem with the states desire for healthy people, artists such as Matsumto Shunsuke (b.1912, d.1948), tired  of conflict and the continuous anxieties of war, found escapism in depicting strong, healthy bodies inspired by ancient Greece. This demonstrates the subjective duality of health, or how health can be commodified and utilised in the same way to suit opposing means. 

Metaphors of health and strength were easily projected onto ideas of painting, providing ground for divisive debate, which was amplified by the arrival in Tokyo in 1938 of the Great German Art Exhibition. The  Nazi’s view of modern, expressionistic forms of creation as degenerate  art created by developmentally challenged, ‘unhealthy’ people struck a chord with the newly formed Health Ministry, and inspired a deeper interest in Nazi art throughout the Japanese empire. As Maki Kaneko has pointed out, by the late 1930s ‘health' or ‘healthy’ became a common trope to evaluate or describe artworks. In 1938, against this turbulent backdrop of rising tension between the state-sanctioned ‘healthy’, socialist realist inspired Sensōga (war painting) and more subjective, expressionist   work of the avant-garde, Katsura Yuki painted ‘Human I’ and ‘Human II’.

‘Human I’ demonstrates Yuki’s anxiety  at the increase of nationalism and invasion of every part of life enacted through fascistic government policies and military control of cultural output. In her disturbing image  the suggestion of human shapes are reduced to bare minimum; worm-like  formations assemble in a line at the bottom of the painting, drifting armless and legless in shallow pictorial space. At the lower right side of the image a taller form rises above the others, seemingly staring out at them, as if from a place of authority. The line  of hapless creatures have few features, apart from wide eyes that dart in opposing directions, or stare out at the viewer in a mixture of self pity and confusion.  

Two of the central figures wear  inane smiles, one grins upside down, its mouth above its eyes. The remaining forms are almost exclusively without lips or mouths. This provokes an unsettling sense of madness, of loss of control, emotion misplaced or teetering on the edge of total breakdown. In the top left corner of the painting another lone ‘blob’ stares mouthless across the picture towards an enormous round head in the top right corner, which has both mouth and eyes. The floating head’s right eye stares back, climbing out of its socket on its own accord, splitting off from its owner and crawling into the picture space as an independent form. The left eye ascends skyward like smoke or a mushroom cloud, and appears to have developed two eyes of its own. Occupying  most of the upper half of the  canvas rises one of the great symbols of Japanese national identity and power; Mount Fuji. In an act of direct opposition to the visual propaganda intimating  the might of the empire,  Yuki reduces Mount Fuji to a  colourless, flaccid mass barely able to stand on its own.

Given that Mount Fuji is arguably still the most recognisable emblem of Japan and a tangible site for powerful metaphors of resilience and both physical and mental strength, the ability of natural wonders to attract, and eventually transcend use by militarist ideology is clear. Here Katsura’s Fuji is nullified, reclaimed by innocence and dislocated from the grand  nationalistic images of the mountain by artists such as Yokoyama Taikan (b.1868, d.1958) whose Nihonga style paintings glorified Mount Fuji in sanitised perfection. For Taikan, Fuji represented the spiritual superiority of the Japanese. Yokoyama was amongst a small number of Nihonga painters supported by the state in the Yōga dominated world of Sensōga.  He went on to paint propagandist images of Fuji in the early 1940s that were sold to raise funds for the war effort, the proceeds of which were used to purchase airplanes that were then named after the artist. After the Japanese surrender images of Mount Fuji were heavily censored by the Allied Occupation forces as they considered the mountain to be an imperial symbol.

In contrast to the fearful beings in ‘Human I’, Katsura’s reappropriated  mountain is the only glimmer of hope in the darkness of her painting, as it can be read as an immortal object that overcomes the present through its link to the past and the future. Hope crystallised in the natural world is further extended to the presence of a tree suggested by a simple triangle shape supported by a trunk, and a river or pathway that winds its way down the side of the mountain. As we shall see later, the natural world, animals in particular, become important subjects of protest and opposition in Katsura’s art of the postwar period.  

The whole image is tightly cropped from the top and bottom, squashing its inhabitants  into the pictorial space. A loose suggestion of perspective is provided by the line of human ‘blobs’ that extends back into the picture plane, and outwards towards the viewer then beyond the edge of the canvas. This also provides a sense of lateral movement across the painting from left to right, suggesting the image extends ‘off stage’ beyond the frame of the canvas. The flattening of and filling of space creates a frenzied immediate painting that is difficult to navigate. Katsura deploys repetition and anthropomorphism not to only obliterate any sense of uniqueness or individuality amongst the human forms, but also to pick apart popular symbols of imperial strength, such as Mount Fuji. A familiar visual language is emerging in Katsura’s work that continues throughout the postwar period, namely direct confrontation of the viewer by mouthless forms, often stacked on top of each other or physically trapped or wrapped in paper or fabric. Furthermore, ‘Human I’ seen through the lens of wartime rhetoric is ‘unhealthy’, lacking any of the obedient, decisive, sacrificial action imaged through the myth of the Three Brave Bombers.  

If ‘Human I’ opposes the destruction and invasion of the individual body and the mass call to war, it does so with at least glimmer of hope completely bereft in ‘Human II’.  The painting takes the same format as ‘Human I’ and was painted in the same year, yet the sense of potential redemption and escape alluded to through Mount Fuji in ‘Human I’ has been removed. Instead we are left with another tightly packed canvas featuring the seven sorrowful figures from ‘Human I’ huddling in a row. They have sprouted legs, feathers protrude from their heads, and they are now joined by a young child. Encasing them is an oval-like bubble of lighter pigment, the shape of which is repeated again above them in the sky. At the top of the painting hovers a large Zeppelin. It is notable that in 1937, the year before Katsura made ‘Human II,’ the pride of Nazi Germany, the  Hindenburg Zeppelin,  crashed in New Jersey, USA killing 35 of the 96 people onboard. It is likely that Katsura was aware of the disaster, especially as ties between Germany and Japan had strengthened through the Anti-Comintern pact signed in 1936. Here, the apparition of a Zeppelin hovering over the people is a portent of destruction.

At the base of the painting lies a corpse with a cross over its chest. The figures stand above the corpse, some are looking down at it whilst other look up at the Zeppelin in the sky. It is significant that Katsura chooses to depict her ‘blob-like’ figures as mouthless, yet her corpse is open mouthed and looking down towards the earth. Perhaps Yuki is suggesting the huge numbers of dead speak of the realities of an aggressive drawn out war, or that only in death are the voices of the people freed, if only symbolically. Additionally, this may revisit the idea of the redemptive power of nature seen in ‘Human I’, as eventually all living beings are returned to the earth and become part of the land. 

As Namiko Kunimoto has pointed out, ‘Human I' and 'Human II ‘enact dissent’ by altering the aesthetic ‘mode of recognisable nationalist icon’ usually demonstrated through sensōga. To extend this further, I propose that Katsura depicts a deep rooted sense of anxiety over the loss of individuality at the hands of powerful military rhetoric commodified through media and imaged through such stories as the Three Brave Bombers. She also alludes to an ambiguous, psychological avant-garde that resists the blunted certainty of state-sponsored realism. Katsura questions the cultural hegemony enacted by the states channeling of a nationalistic national identity to which citizens were levered into adopting. This conception of personal and national identity was contingent on the state, and was in part predicated on the survival of militarism. As we  shall see,  this is to collapse in the aftermath of the end of the war in 1945. 

Katsura’s distorted, deformed bodies shown in 'Human I’  and ‘Human II’ represent fallible human sites besieged by the state; her images combine a mix of victimisation, blind faith  in the empire, and obedience to militarist rule. The critical power in Humans I and Humans II resides in the paintings’ ability to protest state ownership of the human body by showing this ownership taking place, the act of imaging is an act of dissent. Her mouthless forms are far enough removed from resembling people that    they avoid the limitations of literal description, reaching out instead for an emotive response from the viewer. The title of the works nullify any remaining ambiguity and reinforces the fallibility of the human being, Katsura seems to reaffirm the universal knowledge that we are all flesh and blood.

Katsura’s act of depicting anxiety at the idea of death in the name of the nation, an idea which many saw as honourable and indeed necessary, was risky business. The nationalistic propaganda of the  prewar period pushed the idea of the Japanese as a pure race, free from contamination or influence from outsiders. Any doubts about the strength or willingness of the Japanese people to die for the ‘holy war’ could not be imaged, or even the enter public consciousness. ‘Human I’ and ‘Human II’  oppose this ideology by placing all humans in the same bracket, in the same victim space, at the mercy of one another. 

The inhabitants of Katsura’s ‘victim space’ often appear trapped under piles of painterly detritus or metamorphosing into various creatures. The half-human forms appear possessed, wide eyed and unable to function under their own will, they seem at the mercy of forces beyond their control. State control and consumption of the Japanese body, specifically the female body, was to reach new heights in 1941 with the introduction of the national Eugenics law. Government health agencies established eugenics information centres in shopping districts, offering advice on how to identify hereditary diseases, and how to go about sterilisation in a bid to ensure the future purity of the Japanese race. The eugenics counselling  centres also provided the government with an opportunity to monitor the population level and gather further information on its citizens. The female body was seen as a product to be used and manipulated; female citizenship was defined by procreation and consumption. Huge numbers of lives had been consumed by the war, which law makers soon realised would lead to a major population shortage, which subsequently led  to restrictions on any form of birth control to healthy women of childbearing age.

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Full essay available on request

Extract from ' Living Now, Creating Now; Expression as a Moment of Action'

As time has passed I have learnt more and more about the philosophy of Shobu. Even with my limited knowledge, it's clear this is a unique place that prioritises instinctive creative spirit over the intellect. There is so much life here that flourishes beyond the boundaries of the ego. Societal pressures that sculpt us over time and encourage us engage with the world in a dishonest and self-conscious manner have no room here at Shobu Gakuen.

 My lack of language ability has allowed me to build relationships in different ways. As I remain one step removed, my relationships with Shobu members are simple and honest, and often initiated and lead by them. At times less is more, and I am able to use facial expressions and gestures to great effect. 

I am dedicated to enacting intentional communication, meaning that I give each interaction the same energy and focus.

 There are many different types of art works being made at Shobu. From a production perspective, some of the most structured processes are observed in autistic individuals. There appears to be two common approaches - 'controlled chaos' or 'controlled order', with both featuring a high level of repetition. 

 From what first appears to be chaotic or random emerges a system with clear rules, which are repeated daily with the same vigour, enthusiasm and excitement as if it were the very first time. Often using similar or near identical motifs or patterns, these artists work tirelessly as if searching for ultimate truth of expression. 

 The more ordered approach often consists of symmetrical patterns or lines of motifs or text. These artists keep neat work spaces and use materials that are easy to control such as pen, pencil or occasionally paint.

 The final product is not the goal. Living in the moment in the truest sense, great satisfaction comes from the process of creation and its through this that they are able to transcend notions of success or failure. Each mark is a moment fully experienced and what happens to the work once it is complete is of little to no consequence. 

 For some, keeping the works forms part of the process. One studio member, for example, is protective of his creations and takes great care of his artworks, they are stored in boxes and regularly re organised. If asked to produce work for a specific purpose, he is happy to give the final product up, so long as it is made clear from the beginning that work is needed elsewhere. The attachment he has to his work is flexible and based on staff managing his expectations. 

 It's important to maintain a consistent environment for Shobu members. Changes can be introduced, but this must happen slowly and with plenty of warning. Structure and reliability provide comfort and reassurance, nurturing an environment that allows for total creative freedom.

 All artists working in washi show the same high levels of energy and focus when they are fully engrossed in their work. During these times the quality of the concentrated silence found in the studio is difficult to describe. It's like a stillness that hides below it the buzzing of minds and the whirling of pens, pencils, paper and paint. It feels like each member of the studio is on a quest to discover the purest form of visual language. 

 The immediacy with which these artists work is mesmerising. With close to zero hesitation, works are created at speed. It's very inspiring to watch and I hope some of these qualities will find there way into my working practice. 

Anxieties of Change: Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress and the Representation of the Body in Post-War Japanese Avant-Garde Artistic Practice

In the prefecture of Kagoshima in southern Japan some of the world’s finest green teas are grown. Small fans sit on top of long black poles, quietly circulating the air over the precious plants. Ordered rows of green tea bushes reflect the sunlight and seem to march in  neat lines for miles towards the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea. Further north in the expanding urban areas great illuminated tower blocks appear to rebuild themselves overnight in a show of politely aggressive modernisation.

Japan today has a prevailing sense of order and steady progress which masks a chaotic and complex past. The empirical scars of conflict were relatively quickly sutured post surrender of World War Two, but the deep emotional, intellectual and cultural damage is perhaps much harder to heal. The devastation wrought by a foreign nations technological development left Japan in tatters, bruised and forced to reexamine its identity and position on the global stage. Japan’s war responsibility also needed to be reflected upon; how could an entire nation turn so quickly to militarism, declaring a state of total war and pushing its citizens to the frontline? Many postwar Japanese artists chose the human body as a site to negotiate these complexities by representing the body or by physically incorporating their own bodies into their work.

Monuments to a rich cultural history can be seen dotted around the Japanese landscape; the bright red Tore Gate protruding from abundant greenery, weathered Shinto shrines resist the turbulent volatility of nature, temples teeter on the edge of volcanoes.  Almost everywhere there appears a tension between the natural world and the industrial, as the elements cannot be mastered, but simply respected, tolerated, kept at bay. Great concrete trenches are dug into the sides of volcanoes to act as channels to redirect lava away from populated areas. Mountains are tunnelled and great bridges link previously inaccessible areas. There is also tension in the relationship between the past and the present, as Japanese people seek to come to terms with the fast pace of life they have encountered and partly encouraged since the end of the Second World War, and the traditional values that form part of their perceived national identity. 

Junichiro Tanizaki (b. 1886, d. 1965) captures the uncertainty and the potentially destructive nature of technology beautifully in his essay on Japanese aesthetics ‘In Praise of Shadows’. Tanizaki laments the rapid uptake  of electrical lighting across Japan and how this major development changed the appearance of the Japanese dwelling, and subsequently everything in it. Patrons of restaurants, eyes now used to harsh artificial lighting, complain about the dullness of traditional candlelight in establishments that have not yet embraced the brightly lit march of progress. The subtlety of shadows and the secrets they hold are of particular fascination for Tanizaki, but in Japan’s quest for modernisation shadows no longer represent calm and contemplation, but instead the darkness of the past.  The future must be bright and electrified, no more so than during the two decades following  the close of the Second World War.

On the 15th August 1945 Emperor Hirohito went on national radio to announce the Japanese surrender. The American Forces were to occupy Japan and in turn impose censorship on artistic journals and publications until 1952. This censorship of creativity and  curtailing of the freedom of expression may have contributed to the erosion of an idea of both personal and national identity amongst the Japanese people. At the same time, the American occupation facilitated a freedom within the art world now unrestricted by the previous military regime, although still not without control measures. Not only was the country invaded and controlled by outside forces, but in a way the bodies of the Japanese people were also being invaded via a stringent series of immunisations administered by the occupying forces.  How might an occupied country begin to rediscover its sense of identity? How might a return to traditional Japanese culture manifest without encouraging a return to feudal thinking? How might artists respond to the breakneck increase in technology, that by 1956 was poised to run into over-drive?

During the 1950’s the very landscape of Japan was undergoing massive changes. In a bid to connect the major cities, high speed trains were developed in 1957 and the first Shinkansen train was introduced in 1964. But with this new technology to transport masses of people at high speeds came the partial disintegration of the traditional family unit, as more people moved to the cities. The geography of the ever changing city presented an urban mass of sprawling opportunity, hiding the everyday anxieties that could lie behind such rapid change. Artists began to explore ways in which they could locate and represent this bodily experience through materials not traditionally associated with either Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting) and Yoga (Western style oil painting).

In this essay I will explore how the work of avant- garde artist Atsuko Tanaka (b: 1932, d: 2005) negotiated these changes and sought to connect a sense of personal identity with a sense of national anxiety in post war Japan. I will look in particular at Electric Dress, 1956   (Fig.1, 2) and how this work challenges the limits of the body and its relationship to technology. I will examine how the work evokes the changing technological landscape of Japan, and how the circuits and boundaries represented in the work are reflected in Tanaka’s paintings, and in the wider development in national economic progress.  

As Fauvism had been a destructive and revolutionary force in Europe, Michiaki Kawakita suggests that in Japan the opposite was the case. Although European fauvism was hugely influential in Japan, it was not seen as particularly revolutionary. Instead, academic realism was far from the mainstream of Japanese tradition, and it was undertaken as a kind of conscious revolution by artists dissatisfied with the past. Tanaka’s performative pieces may be a later extension of this dissatisfaction, enacted not through descriptive or representational image making, but instead through a sensory and bodily experience. She obliterates realism and  pushes the jarring colours and gestural aspects of fauvism further by making art that operates between painting with light and performing with colour. As we will see, light was an important dimension of Tanaka’s art, as it was for many other avant-garde Japanese artists.

By the early 1950’s social realism was the dominant force in modern Japanese artistic practice. This form of arguably conservative image making was popular in the urban centres such as Japan and Osaka, but most likely failed to meet the rising post-war anxiety felt in artistic circles that existed outside of establish cultural centres. Although some believed after the loss of the war the nations destiny should be entrusted to the arts, the possibilities of social realism may have seemed limited and tired, and did not necessarily reflect the wider international trends in artistic practice. Artists such as Ebihara Kinosuke (b. 1904, d. 1970) and Ichiro Fukuzawa (b. 1898, d. 1992) departed from this mode of image making by depicting broken and twisted bodies, reacting to contemporary warfare in much the same way as many European artists did in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Whilst Fukuzawa presented deformed and shattered human bodies in his surrealist paintings, Tanaka chose to push to entirely remove any representation of the human body, instead replacing it with the physical body itself. Tanaka’s art alludes to the idea that the desire for self-recovery felt in Japan could not be articulated through a painting practice that could be interpreted as outdated or considered European in its origin.  

Stridently pushing back against traditionalism, in 1954 Jiro Yoshihara (b.1905, d. 1972) the wealthy heir to a cooking oil fortune, founded the  Gutai Bijitsu Kyokai, or Gutai Group, of which Tanaka was a member for nearly ten years. Gutai roughly translates as ‘concreteness’ or ‘embodiment’, indicating the groups interest in the relationship between materials and the human body. The group was founded in Osaka-Kobe region  and was active for approximately eighteen years before disbanding due to the death of Yoshihara in 1972. The Gutai Group manifesto pivoted around Yoshihara’s call to artist to make what had never before been seen, and to place materials at the heart of artistic practice, going beyond abstraction and back to the concrete. With a core focus on the process of creation over the production of a final piece of work, Yoshihara challenged the young artists who visited his studio to question ‘aesthetic, philosophical and geographical boundaries’ to create work that represented the freedom of originality. 

At the centre of Gutai was the groups drive to engage with the materiality of painting and to push the concept of painting to its very limits, partly through play and whimsy as a way of transforming the painting process. Arguably this concept transforms the canvas from a sacred space, as in European Modernism, to a site for playful experimentation. The playful dimension of Gutai art should not be taken lightly, as it disguises a reference to the violence of the war. The ‘collapse of violence into whimsy’ allowed Gutai artists to negotiate and explore the destructive violence of the war, without it becoming the sole focus of the work. Another important point to be made here is that the majority of Gutai artists were incredibly serious about their practice, and although the work may appear playful, the conception and creation was a process of serious contemplation. 

Yoshihara also had visionary ideas in relation to exhibition presentation. Often choosing to exhibit Gutai works outside, he created exhibitions that were participatory for the audience and that engaged with the natural environment. By presenting the works outside, the art object was stripped of its frame of the gallery and placed in a ‘real world’ surround that dwarfed the traditional artwork. The scope for presenting kinetic and large scale works outdoors was far broader, although working in nature did present its own problems in regard to installation and audience engagement. By eliminating the rigid power play structure of the gallery, Gutai artists were able to open their art to a wider public. Furthermore, by exhibiting the works outside, they removed any sense of ownership, allowing the works the freedom to  interact with the natural world. The natural elements could become part of the works, changing their appearance over time.

Another major drive behind the Gutai groups creation of work was the search for authenticity, partly as a rejection of wartime feudalism. This reached new limits when in 1955 Kazuo Shiraga (b. 1924, d. 2008) performed his work Challenging Mud (Fig. 3) Unlike Tanaka, who used technology to question the authenticity of Japan’s new economic drive,  Shiraga chose to strip down to just his underwear and wrestle with mud. The mud itself was meticulously mixed by Shiraga, creating a kind of paint. In an act of self-expression through minimal material means, Shiraga literally wrestled with the earth, his body against the land. Ming Tiampo has described this act as a means to express the ‘personal material of the individual’, drawing attention to the power of the singular body.  Given that the occupying American forces had only handed Japan back in 1952, Shiraga’s work could also be viewed as the artist attempting to reclaim the earth, struggling with it not as separate from him, but as part of its make-up. In this way the work  can be internalised as a highly personal struggle with Shiraga’s sense of self and his uncertain relationship with the country he calls home. Perhaps he was even claiming that it is the earth that must be returned to in order to move beyond the horrors of war, and that the land must be reclaimed.

Tanaka first exhibited Electric Dress at the the Gutai Group’s 1956 Tokyo debut at Ohara Kaikan during the Second Gutai Art Exhibition, showing the work in front of a number of her drawings. Staring out of a mass of over 200 coloured lightbulbs and wires, the artists face is barely visible, as though engulfed and tangled in a seething array of light and electrical wires. The dress itself may be seen as a reference to Japan’s traditional Kimono, which by 1956 was already beginning to be reserved for ceremonial purposes only, in part due to the increasing dominance of Western style clothing. The mix of technology and traditional dress resulted in a cumbersome futuristic, glowing garment, bereft of any utilitarian purpose.

Weighing over 50kgs, the dress itself had to be suspended from the ceiling to allow Tanaka to take the weight over a prolonged period. Across the floor hundreds of electrical cables snake towards the artist, then up her body. Elongated, hand painted tubular bulbs hang all around Tanaka’s form, obliterating her human shape almost entirely. It is very likely that the heat of the bulbs themselves would cause the enamel paint to smell, causing the work to interact with another bodily sense for a viewer; that of smell. The flashing lightbulbs arrest the onlooker, whilst the heat and smell of the work create an atmosphere all of their own, much like the urban metropolis can. Similar to a city, the work had to be powered by outside means in order to fulfil its main function.

 The physicality and size of the dress overcomes the presence of the wearer, in the same way that new developments in technology and media may overcome the individual. This in turn presents questions around ideas of individuality in a post- war society that is becoming  increasingly industrialised and, to a certain extent, able to facilitate further the concept of the individual. Namiko Kunimoto warns that the Gutai have been wrongly interpreted as expressing American-style democracy and individualism, primarily by English speaking scholars. Arguably individualism necessitates a fixed sense of self, one that Tanaka’s art deliberately questions and partly negates. Electric Dress expresses uncertainty in the power of the individual, whereas Shiraga’s Challenging Mud actively sought to build on the new idea of individual expression. Both works activate surface but in strikingly different ways; Shiraga battles with the natural world whilst Tanaka is engulfed by the industrial.

The creative tension between community and the individual was of great importance to Yoshihara and the Gutai Group. By breaking free of history, the group or community is able to annul any association with negative group identity and nationalism, thus allowing the community to become compatible with the individual without risking totalitarianism. The Gutai group exists as a community of artist individuals creating work that does not need to be presented in the context of group, but can actively engage with an audience as standalone works of art. Therefore the group is important because it allows ideas to be explored and exhibited, yet the group does not define the individual. Yoshihara was revolutionary in his approach to globalising the art of the Gutai Group, sending out journals and postcards  featuring Gutai works all over the world. Works by the group became a media attraction through  not only their avant-garde radicalness, but also through their ground breaking use of public relations to garner critical attention. Yoshihara famously sent his Gutai journal, a publication that featured text and images of works by the group, to Allan Kaprow, Jackson Pollock and Michel Tapié. Every artists name was translated into English and printed in the European characters.

In Tanaka Atsuko’s Electric Dress the body becomes a support, yet the body is overshadowed by that which it holds up. One requires the other, yet they operate in opposition to one another. Layers of the dress could represent the layers of the cityscape, engulfing those at the centre and rendering them unrecognisable, seemingly inconsequential. Also much like the urban landscape, Electric Dress is performative only whilst inhabited, the city is itself a constant presence brought to life via the introduction of the human body. The dress is self-referential, the unfilled void at the centre refers to the body in a similar way to how the cityscape exists and constantly refers to the human body, whether inhabited bodily or not.

The lightbulbs themselves flash every two and half minutes, not only creating a kind of frenzied and jarring experience for the viewer, but also changing how the work appears aesthetically. The light illuminates the space around the work, therefore extending the boundaries of its reach, even if only momentarily while the lights are on.  The timing of the light also helps to preserve a sense of structure to the work, preventing it from becoming chaotic or unpredictable. There is a tension between the predictable, rhythmic fixity of the lights and the human body at the centre, as the body and its functions are vulnerable and cannot be controlled. The dress emphasises the vulnerability of the human body, whilst at the same time is dehumanising and overpowering. The apparent dangers of electricity  cannot be ignored, adding to the tension felt by an onlooker. 

The powerful electrical element of Electric Dress highlights the idea that new technology and power brings with it new dangers. The economic growth brought about by the introduction of the Tokaido train line was fuelled by access to bigger job markets and the ability to transport people and goods far quicker than ever before. The negative and unexpected side of this economic development was the increase in suicide by jumping in front of trains. Mounting pressures brought on by overcrowding in urban areas, coupled with the memory of the violence of the war surely contributed to this phenomenon. Alarmingly this was much more prevalent amongst women between the ages of twenty and twenty four. Here technology literally destroys the body by disintegrating it through the impact of rapid movement.

Tanaka’s excitement towards kinetic energy is well documented in Kunimoto’s 2013 essay on the artist ‘Tanaka Atsuko’s Electric Dress and the Circuits of Subjectivity’. Tanaka  was reputedly fascinated by trains and the speed of modern travel, which no doubt had an influence on her work; Kunimoto even states the train was Tanaka’s self-professed muse. New avenues for media and advertising came with the introduction of transport capable of carrying masses of people. A captive audience could be exposed to rapidly changing series of colourful billboards and flashing lights offering many different kinds of product. It was in a train station that Tanaka developed the idea for Electric Dress. Osaka’s rapid commercialisation clearly had a profound effect on the young artist, one that was filled with  both trepidation and excitement, lived out through her Electric Dress.

Recalling the work  of Abstract Expressionists, particularly Jackson Pollock, a great hero of the Gutai Group, Tanaka’s two dimensional paintings present swirling concentric circles and dripping lines of painterly gestures. Her later paintings evolved from Electric Dress and incorporate the same ideas of wires and connections. Whilst Electric Dress could be said to rely on the structure of the repetitive flashing lights to maintain a sense of order, Tanaka’s paintings seem to rely on the structure of the almost perfect circle. The circles are joined together with lines, like wires running between electrical units. The scale of the circles provide a sense of perspective in a similar way that Pollock does with his drip paintings. The thickness of Pollock’s drips and their repetitive nature creates a surface that has a depth and perspective. 

Tanaka’s paintings are like plan views of great machines or incubators, yet their organic structure and colour ensure they do not become entirely industrialised in their appearance. The wire like lines that join the concentric circles appear to track and trace movement, like a photograph taken with a long exposure. Pulsating and fizzing, the wires fight each other in a feverish tangle of confusion, possibly creating a sense of anxiety in the onlooker. Non-harmonious and jarring coloured squiggles weave in and out of circles made up of mainly  primary colours. Like balls of wool unravelling into the sky or cascading across the ground, its difficult to tell if one is looking up into Tanaka’s paintings or down into them. 

Work, 1976 (Fig. 4) is dominated by a solid green circle that sits just up from centre of the canvas, surrounded by lines and other smaller circles. There appears to be six clusters of coloured orbs, all joined together by innumerable frantic lines of varying thickness. The marks made by Tanaka are repetitive and gestural, yet the circles are carefully avoided and never crossed, so that the lines do not intersect them. Instead the lines seem to enter each circle, in the same way as a wire enters an electrical bulb. 

Repetition is an important device for Tanaka. The repetitive flashing lights of Electric Dress and the repeated coloured circles of her paintings bring to mind the work of contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) Through her use of repeated motif Kusama appears to be searching for truth of expression by moving away from the conscious action of image creation. By partly negating the decision making process, Kusama is able create work as a direct and unhindered reaction to her materials and environment, with limited hesitation. It could be said that Tanaka incorporates some of these elements into her work, but unlike Kusama who uses a variety of formats to examine repetition, such as painting onto flower-like pods and organic forms, Tanaka kept her paintings on paper or canvas. For Tanaka, repetition conceals a type of anxiety, as if through creating the same image over and over again she will somehow exert a sense of control over her surroundings. 

Tanaka faced her own battle with mental health, and was eventually institutionalised for a short time in 1965.  The nature of her struggle cannot be fully understood, nor the impact this had on her art, but I believe the repetition of motif in her work helped her to maintain a sense of progress and security. Repetition is also a common theme found in works by artist with developmental difficulties. This is evidenced most clearly by artists working at Shobu Gakuen, a facility and studio in Southern Japan that provides support and studio space for artists with developmental and learning difficulties. Artists such as Nobuko Onaga use layers of repetition by creating shapes that repeat across the surface of the paper, and then fill these shapes with repeated dots (Fig. 5). Shin Fukumori has written extensively on the power of repetition, and suggests that by discarding theories and logic in art a truer sense of expression can be found, one that is ultimately free from right or wrong. By repeating a form over and over, that form is fully discovered and explored, it is reborn and has no beginning and no end.

It could be argued that Tanaka sought to address the unease and anxiety felt not just by the individual, but by the society that surrounded her through exhibiting Electric Dress. The dress represents the dualism of technology that is simultaneously optimistic and fear-full.  The bright, colourful lights of the dress speak of a playfulness, but the overwhelming luminosity that flickers on and off hides the unpredictability of Japan’s new economic drive. Tanaka’s Gutai colleagues made work that is in the most part optimistic, hoping for a future that is free of destructive technology utilised during the war, whereas Tanaka engages critically with notions of mechanised progress.

There was no technology more destructive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki  in 1945. These devastating acts left a deep wound in the Japanese psyche, no doubt influencing the generations of artists who came after. Even Tanaka’s paintings appear as if they are multi coloured mushroom clouds seen from above, in a way they demonstrate the shocking creative beauty found in such acts of mass destruction. Through the repetition of form Tanaka finds a way to examine her subconscious connection to recent history, removing the cumbersome hesitation found in over-intellectualising the painting process. Just as the Gutai Group believed that the new community should be built from the bottom up, Tanaka builds her paintings in the same way, laying the canvas flat on the ground and adding paint from above. This process allows her exploit the material qualities of paint by not exerting too much control. It could be said that Tanaka is creating sculpture with paint, as she constructs paintings from a flat horizontal surface and builds them upwards.

By exploring boundaries and bodily connections in her work, Atsuko Tanaka questions how far technology can be allowed to encroach on the life of the individual in post war Japan.  The benefits that new modes of transport bring to Japanese society are clear, yet Atsuko interrogates these with a degree of scepticism. To her, a community without the individuals ability to act at alone, or to speak out against those around her, presented danger. Japan turned to societal thinking and thus to war by controlling masses of its population. After the Second world War, as a country desperate to transition from war torn to prosperous, the acceptance of modernisation and the denial of tradition was a source of constant anxiety for Tanaka and other Gutai artists. These artists chose to express this through battling with materials and  the ideas of selfhood, presenting art that was radical and optimistic for a liberated future. The post-war moment was one filled with uncertainty and anxiety and Atsuko Tanaka   presented this through her Electric Dress.