Japan Art Revolution

Early last year, I wrote about Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, a documentary by Amélie Ravalec on a group of artists that in the 1960s and 70s revolutionized their country’s creative expressions. These expressions include the full gamut of what we understand as art, whether photography, printed or painted visual art (posters as much as paintings), writing, theater, dance, and more.

A new lavishly illustrated companion book has now been published in the form of Japan Art Revolution (The Japanese Avant-Garde, from Angura to Provoke). The documentary and the book complement each other perfectly, especially given that some of the expressions need to be seen as they unfold while others are static and live from being experienced with the flow of time stopped.

Examples of the former include butoh dance performances or recordings of the Hi Red Center performances. Given the time that has passed since they were staged, video recordings are all we have left to experience at least some of their impact. Examples of the latter include photography, posters, and paintings.

What I have found particularly compelling about the artists included in this look at a particularly rich moment in Japan’s cultural history is the fact that many of them interacted and worked with each other. In addition, some played more than one role. Terayama Shūji, for example, was an avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. Nakahira Takuma was a writer and critic, photographers, editor, and translator.

In fact, almost all of the photographers included in Japan Art Revolution are the least interesting in this larger setting. With the notable exception of Hosoe Eikō none of them sought out other artists to create collaborative work (Terayama had pulled a few of them, most noticeably Moriyama Daidō, into his orbit to have them photograph underground theater, but most appeared eager to leave when they were able to).

For all the right reasons, Hosoe’s work with both writer Mishima Yukio and dancers Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo has been widely celebrated. With Mishima he created Ordeal by Roses, with Hijikata Kamaitachi.

Perhaps due to the very nature of their medium, photographers tend to be an insecure bunch, preferring to establish a lone-wolf image around themselves. Hosoe knew better. He deliberately worked with Mishima, Hijikata, and Ohno — all three incredibly strong personalities themselves — because he knew that in the give and take between two very different forms of creative expression something magical can occur.

Mishima was known for his writing, but as Donald Keene made very clear in his diaries, he was intensely focused on creating a particular image around himself, which included sculpting his body.

Both in Ordeal by Roses and Kamaitachi, the push and pull between two magnificent artists collaborating can be seen — and felt. In the former, Hosoe managed to channel Mishima’s narcissism into an utterly compelling set of photographs. In the latter, it feels as if Hosoe’s camera barely managed to contain the sheer physicality and wit expressed by Hijikata.

Japan Art Revolution is particularly interesting given that it showcases the back and forth between many of the artists featured in its pages. It is as if even as viewers far removed from the time when these pieces of art were made (or performed) we still end up enmeshed in the spider web that was created by this large group of artists.

That spider web arose out of a very specific moment in time in Japan’s post-war history, with massive protests erupting against the so-called Anpo security treaty with the United States (there is a chapter in the book) while the economy started booming and living conditions for most people became a lot better within a short period of time.

Richly illustrated, Japan Art Revolution provides a marvelous overview of what Japan’s most cutting-edge artists would produce. The illustrations are complemented by a wealth of quotes either by the artists themselves or by a number of scholars. As can be expected, the artists talking about themselves and their work yields in much insight into why things look the way they look. The experience of living under frequent bombings during World War 2 and the later occupation play very prominent roles.

Depending on where you’re coming from, you could view Japan Art Revolution as only looking back on a particular moment in Japan’s cultural history — or as asking questions about our own particular moment right now. I personally would like to think of it as doing both.

While there is much to admire in how the artists showcased in the book reacted to the troubled times they lived in, there is a lot less to admire in how today’s artists are reacting (or rather mostly not reacting) to what we are facing today.

Of course, comparing different times in history is always problematic, especially when large cultural differences come into play. Still… Will there be a book like this one about our times and our artists?

In other words, what can we learn from all of the truly gifted and fearless individuals whose work still resonates so strongly almost five decades after it was first made?

Recommended.

Japan Art Revolution — The Japanese Avant-Garde, from Angura to Provoke; editor: Amélie Ravalec; with contributions by numerous artists and writers; 320 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2026

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. There, you will find exclusive articles, videos, and audio guides about the world of the photobook and more. For those curious, there now is the possibility of a trial membership for seven days.

Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

There also is a Mailing List, which I use to send out supplementary materials — anything that has me inspired or that somehow seemed worth noting. Some of it is serious, some is not. You can sign up for free here.

Thank you for your support!

I never thought much about how collages might operate in a book context other than in a catalogue. The closest I can think of would be Jindřich Štyrský‘s Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream (I have a copy of this most recent reprint; you can access a pdf of the 1997 reprint here). But even there, while it is an artist’s book, it still does not stray very far from what a catalogue might do (except, perhaps, omit the inevitable curator essays).

There also is Hannah Höch’s Life Portrait. But that’s also not quite it, because the book presents a single large collage in smaller sections.

So what might a collage monograph look like? A possible answer has arrived in the form of James Gallagher‘s Wild Flowers: a large-scale collage itself. The book combined the collages from Gallagher’s series Desire with illustrations from the 1919 book Wild Flowers Worth Knowing.

In very broad terms, Wild Flowers covers some of the same territory Štyrský operated in. Both artists use photographs from pornographic source (Gallagher adds in some other material that, given the juxtapositions, comes across as such). Whereas the Czech surrealist used contemporary imagery, though, the American collage artist relies on older material.

We can’t fully comprehend how Štyrský’s somewhat surrealist collages might have impacted viewers around the time they were made. In retrospect, they do come across as a bit too on the nose in a somewhat vulgar Freudian sense (which, perhaps, is an unfair assessment).

In any case, Gallagher’s work with the human figures in his source material differs from Štyrský’s in that the contemporary collage artist introduces a very different type of surrealism. His bodies end up being cut strategically in places that manage to interrupt their pornographic aspects, to leave behind merely the underlying idea: effectively, he pulls the plug on any eroticism that might be had (or most of it anyway).

After all, ours is a very different world than the one Štyrský inhabited. Photographic depictions of nude bodies have become a lot more easy to come by (these days, in rather perverted ways: Elon Musk’s “AI” will turn any image you feed it into pornography).

In addition, the female body has become an essential item in our hypercapitalist world. Capitalism relies on equating the naked female body with sex (or rather the promise of it). It currently is simply impossible to think of advertizing without partly clothed or fully unclothed female bodies.

(It’s not difficult to imagine that Štyrský, were he to return from the dead, would view today’s advertizing as a surrealist’s fever dream.)

For an artist the challenge of working with erotic imagery is the fact that for a viewer there is always that one, big outcome, namely that they become at least somewhat aroused. Of course, there is nothing particularly wrong with that per se. But good art lives not only from not offering easy outcomes so easily but also from offering a variety of possibilities.

As an aside, this is the same challenge faced by photographers who for whatever reason want to take pictures of the nude figure: unless you are actually a pornographer, you don’t necessarily want to enter that territory. At the same time, if you try too hard to avoid it, things become awkward themselves (there’s nothing worse than art where a viewer can see how the artist tried too hard).

With Desire, Gallagher mostly avoids hitting one of the extremes through the distortions introduced by strategic cutting of the human figures. You would imagine that mixing in images of flowers would be too obvious. But much to my surprise, Wild Flowers works very well. There are a few collages that seem too one-dimensional, but the majority of them is not.

The book pulls a few production tricks, such as using different paper stocks for the different imagery; and there is the occasional gatefold as well. In addition, the paper choices (according to the colophon there are five different ones) evoke some of the raw imagery used for the backgrounds of many of the collages: pages from old books.

All of this combines into a lovely little production that might demonstrate how far an artist working with photographic imagery around nudity can go.

The reality might simply be that given its very nature, photography simply doesn’t contain enough artifice for nudes to reach the artistic value of other types of photography.

Through the interventions with scissors and glue, Gallagher creates just enough additional visual artifice for things to become interesting. In addition, Départ Pour l’Image (the publisher) have added the right amount of supplementary material to transcend the format of the catalogue.

Wild Flowers; collages by James Gallagher; 108 pages; Départ Pour l’Image; 2025

Thank you for your support!