Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan

This exhibition, “Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan,” reexamines the creative activities of artist-women in the 1950s and ’60s based on the keyword of “anti-action” in an effort to reinterpret Japanese modern and contemporary art history.

During this albeit short period, artist-women received a great deal of attention for their work in the field of avant-garde art. This was underpinned by an international abstract art movement called Art Informel (“unformed art”), which flourished in the West and arrived in Japan via France, and criticism related to the trend. On reflection, however, Art Informel proved to be little more than a passing “whirlwind,” the formal concept of Action Painting was imported from the U.S., and artist-women were excluded as a subject of criticism. Critics, the majority of whom were men, embraced the concept of “action” with its associations of boldness and force—qualities culturally coded as masculine. This resulted in a reassertion of traditional gender hierarchies. In analyzing this chain of events in her 2019 book Anti-Action: Post-war Japanese Art and Women Artists, Nakajima Izumi highlights the activities of artist-women who reacted to the action era in other ways, and suggests “anti-action” as a term to describe this trend.

With anti-action as a starting point for reinterpreting art history from the perspective of gender studies, this exhibition introduces artists who were easily mysticized or alienated from the historical narrative. In addition to Kusama Yayoi, Tanaka Atsuko, and Fukushima Hideko, who are the central focus of Nakajima’s book, we present some 120 works by a total of 14 artists, based on the body of prior research and surveys conducted for this exhibition.