Gutai is the first book in English to examine Japan’s best-known modern art movement, a circle of postwar artists whose avant-garde paintings, performances, and installations foreshadowed many key developments in American and European experimental art. Working with previously unpublished photographs and archival resources, Ming Tiampo considers Gutai’s pioneering transnational practice, spurred on by mid-century developments in mass media and travel that made the movement’s field of reception and influence global in scope. Using these lines of transmission to claim a place for Gutai among modernist art practices while tracing the impact of Japan on art in Europe and America, Tiampo demonstrates the fundamental transnationality of modernism. Ultimately, Tiampo offers a new conceptual model for writing a global history of art, making Gutai an important and original contribution to modern art history.

A ground-breaking monograph, recognizing for the first time the noted Japanese post-World War II conceptual avant-garde artist, Atsuko Tanaka. The only female member of the Japanese Gutai Group, Tanaka forged a unique relationship between painting and performance that is only now seen to be far ahead of her time. Thoroughly documented are the artist's drawings, paintings and "leftover objects" from her past performances.

Published in conjunction with the first United States museum retrospective ever devoted to Gutai, exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Gutai: Splendid Playground surveys the influential collective and artistic movement. This exhibition catalogue aims to demonstrate the range of bold and innovative creativity present in the avant-garde movement, to examine the aesthetic strategies in the cultural, social, and political context of postwar Japan and the West, and to further establish Gutai in an expanded, transnational history and critical discourse of modern art. Organized thematically and chronologically to explore Gutai's unique approach to materials, process and performativity, this publication investigates the group's radical experimentation across a range of media and styles, and demonstrates how individual artists pushed the limits of what art could be or mean in a post-atomic era. The range includes painting (gestural abstraction and post-constructivist abstraction), conceptual art, experimental performance and film, indoor and outdoor installation art, sound art, mail art, interactive or 'playful' art, light art and kinetic art. Illustrating both iconic Gutai and lesser-known works, this catalogue presents a rich survey reflecting new scholarship, especially on so-called 'late Gutai' works dating from 1965 to 1972.

Some fifty years ago, the remote Arctic community of Cape Dorset was introduced to the ancient traditions of Japanese printmaking by a Canadian artist, James Houston, who had studied printmaking in Japan with the revered master printmaker Un'ichi Hiratsuka. The remarkable story of that artistic encounter and its extraordinary results are the focus of this groundbreaking book. With two major essays and detailed captions, it features 49 exquisite and rare artworks (including Inuit prints from 1947 to 1963 and Japanese prints that were brought to Cape Dorset in 1959, as well as never-before-seen works by James Houston), and shows how Cape Dorset graphic artists selectively borrowed and actively transformed Japanese influences. It includes the voice of Cape Dorset printmaker Kananginak Pootoogook, as well as previously unplished historic photographs from Japan and Cape Dorset.

How can we move away from colonial ways of being? How do we create communities where sustainable relationships with our environment exist? How can we build a more equitable world? For over thirty years, these profound questions have been at the core of Korean Canadian artist Jin-me Yoon's (b.1960) groundbreaking work. Since the beginning of her career, she has explored questions of identity in national and global contexts, drawing on her experiences of immigration and migration to build an internationally acclaimed practice. In Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work, Ming Tiampo reveals how Yoon's multidisciplinary art-which includes photography, video, performance, and installation-reconnects troubled pasts with damaged presents to create the conditions for a better future. This new title considers how one of Canada's most important voices developed a critical perspective on the dissemination of national narratives through tourism and art history with iconic works such as Souvenirs of the Self, 1991, and A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996, which, as Tiampo notes, have become "canonical touchstones in the public articulation of Canadian identity and race." Yoon's earliest works questioned the construction of self and other, unpacking stereotypical assumptions and dominant discourses on gender and sexuality, culture and ethnicity, and citizenship and nationhood. Adopting a wider and wider lens over time, her recent works investigate entangled global relations of colonialism, tourism, and militarism, unearthing difficult histories and connecting them to our present circumstances. Ultimately, her stirring art asks us to reimagine our relationships to each other and to the planet in order to build more hopeful futures.

Fondé par Yoshihara Jiro en 1954, près d'Osaka, dans la province du Kansai, Gutai est un des mouvements d'avant-garde japonais les plus importants de l'après-deuxième guerre mondiale. Révélé en Europe, et en France, par Michel Tapie, son influence sur l'art nord-américain (automatisme, abstraction lyrique, action painting de Pollock, combine paintings et performances de Rauschenberg. etc.) ainsi que sur l'arte povera italien fut considérable et demeure encore insuffisamment analysée. Le présent essai prend en compte trois éléments fondamentaux : l'importance accordée aux performances et à la scène, l'influence déterminante dans l'histoire du mouvement des fêtes Matsuri du Japon traditionnel et le contexte, enfin, dans lequel s'est développé le mouvement Gutai, à savoir le contexte très particulier de l'après-guerre de 1945. Mise en lumière de l'importance des matériaux, naturels et artificiels. Rôle dévolu au corps et à la gestualité picturale. Happenings. Performance. Œuvres in situ. Gutai a sans doute tout inventé, tout préfiguré. Et l'on reste encore aujourd'hui émerveillé et abasourdi devant tant d'invention, de fraîcheur, de vitalité.

Norio Imai (born 1946) joined the Gutai movement in 1965, becoming their youngest member. This handsome overview surveys his austere, minimalistic work in sculpture, installation, film, video, photography and performance, with abundant archival documentation.

"[I] reject[ed] the idea that painting is autonomous, contained only within its four corners. I realized that painting has to interact with, and is always affected by, the space it is in." -- Jinny Yu JINNY YU: AT ONCE surveys artist Jinny Yu's last decade of production, from her exhibition at the Venice Biennale Don't They Ever Stop Migrating? to Inextricably Ours, her recent kaleidoscopically abstract paintings. Using methods as diverse as abstract painting and large-scale installation, Yu's art ponders the implications of mass migration and rapid social change in contemporary society. In Perpetual Guest, Yu interrogates her status as a settler-immigrant; in Hôte, she navigates the relationship between guest and host through a series of black-and-white abstract drawings that resemble thresholds; in Inextricably Ours, Yu breaks from her previous work, using vivid colours, transparency, and distorted forms to continue to question what it means to be a guest and a host. «J'ai rejeté l'idée que la peinture est autonome, c'est à dire qu'elle soit contenue uniquement dans ses quatre coins. J'ai réalisé que la peinture doit interagir avec et est toujours influencée par l'espace dans lequel elle se trouve.» -- Jinny Yu JINNY YU: À LA FOIS explore la dernière décennie de la production de l'artiste Jinny Yu, depuis son exposition à la Biennale de Venise intitulée Don't They Ever Stop Migrating? jusqu'à Inextricably Ours, ses récentes peintures kaléidoscopiques abstraites. Utilisant des méthodes aussi diverses que la peinture abstraite et l'installation à grande échelle, l'art de Yu réfléchit aux implications de la migration de masse et aux changements sociaux rapides dans la société contemporaine. Dans Perpetual Guest, Yu interroge son statut en tant que colon-immigrant; dans Hôte, elle explore la relation entre l'invité (guest) et l'hôte (host) à travers une série de dessins abstraits en noir et blanc évoquant des seuils; dans Inextricably Ours, Yu rompt avec son oeuvre précédente en utilisant des couleurs vives, la transparence et des formes distordues pour poursuivre son questionnement sur le sens des notions d'invité et d'hôte.