Founded in 2006 by a group of art historians and curators, the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art is an organization that is devoted to conducting interviews with individuals involved in the field of art, and collecting and preserving the results as historical documents. On this website, we publish transcripts of these interviews as part of an ongoing project. Although most of the interviews are conducted and available only in Japanese, in the English section of our website, we publish some that are partially translated.
“I have not graduated from Gutai’s way of thinking. I still want to do something new, that which has not existed before.” Motonaga Sadamasa was eighty-six when he made this reflection on Gutai in 2008, thirty-six years after the group had disbanded. Gutai was not a collective bound by rules of art-making. Rather, it was…
Japanese artists Shigeko Kubota and Shiomi Mieko arrived in New York in 1964 at the invitation of George Maciunas. Working in sculpture, performance, and video, Kubota was active in the avant-garde art community of Tokyo in the early 1960s, and then, after her move to the U.S., among the Fluxus artists in New York. In…
Throughout a career that spans the late 1940s to the present, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro has consistently proven to be one of Japan’s most visionary artists, distinguished by his restless curiosity about new media and means of artistic expression, and a powerful intellect that has been expressed not only through artworks but also through the organization of…
