Midori Yoshimoto is associate professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University. Yoshimoto’s areas of expertise are post-1945 Japanese art and its global intersections, with a particular emphasis on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia art. Her dissertation, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, was published in 2005 (Rutgers Univ. Press). She contributed to numerous museum catalogs, including: Yes Yoko Ono (Japan Society, 2000); Japanese Women Artists in Avant-garde Movements (Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, 2005); Dissonance: Six Japanese Women Artists (Toyota Museum of Art, 2008); Yayoi Kusama (Centre Pompidou, 2011); Ay-O Over the Rainbow Once Again (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2012); Gutai: Splendid Playground (Guggenheim Museum, 2013); and Yoko Ono One Woman Show (MoMA, 2015).
Although postwar Japanese avant-garde art is considered to have ended in the year 1970, Julian Ross contends that projection installations in the 1970s took on many of its characteristics, namely, an engagement with the concepts of “environment,” “intermedia,” and “display.”
Ay-O, a Japanese artist who had been part of Fluxus in New York, returned to Japan in 1966 after an eight-year absence. He organized Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo which was recorded on film and in photographs taken by some of the participants. post presents the film and selected photographs by Nishiyama Teruo, who took part in the tour.
Most of the literature on Fluxus focuses on the movement’s American and European adherents, barely acknowledging the contributions of Japanese artists. This essay sheds light onto the catalytic role Japanese artists played in this trans-Pacific artistic exchange.
