Ming Tiampo is a Canadian curator, professor of art history and director of the Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Tiampo joined the Carleton University faculty in 2003, shortly before completing her PhD and MA in Art History at Northwestern University in Chicago. Her undergraduate degree is from Princeton University. [1] Tiampo is a specialist in transnational modernisms, with a focus on Japan after 1945. Her research seeks to both add to the body of knowledge on modernism beyond the Euro-American canon, and to re-theorize the Eurocentric terms with which art historians write that history. [2]
Tiampo's book ''Gutai: Decentering Modernism'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) is the foundational study of Japan's most significant postwar movement. Based upon archival research in six countries, Tiampo's book shed light upon this important yet forgotten group, and also established a critical methodology for situating and theorizing non-Western modernisms transnationally. [3]
In 2013, Tiampo co-curated the exhibition, Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York City), an exhibition that prompted the notoriously tough New York Times art critic Roberta Smith to comment, "accompanied by a terrific catalog, their effort should permanently dislodge any notion of postwar modernism as a strictly Western phenomenon." [4] The exhibition also received six awards, including the prestigious Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art award for Best Thematic Museum Exhibition in New York that year. [5]
In addition to her work on Gutai, Tiampo has published on Japanese modernism, war art in Japan, globalization and art, multiculturalism in Canada, and the connections between Inuit and Japanese prints. [6] All of these projects cohere through her deep commitment to critically engaging with the cultural consequences of globalization, advocating for new modalities of cultural pluralism, and decolonizing art historical discourses in the academy and the museum.
Not only has Tiampo been prolific, but she has also taken a leadership role in the field, enabling scholarly conversations about world studies on local, national, and international levels. [7] At Carleton, she was a co-founder of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis [8] and instrumental to the centre's active interdisciplinary programme of guest speakers and workshops, which have created an environment of engagement across disciplines for scholars and students. She is also founding associate member of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. [9]
Shōzō Shimamoto was a Japanese artist. Having studied with Jirō Yoshihara, the future Gutai leader, from 1947, Shimamoto was a key founding member of Gutai along with Yoshihara and fifteen others in August, 1954. He was close to the leader Yoshihara and actively engaged in the early activities and group administrations. He [expand this here more in an evocative manner: holes poked on layered newspaper, bottle-throwing paintings, film experiments, stage experiments, sound art, etc. etc.] He was particularly strong with performative innovations, anticipating the future performance art. Indeed, when Yoshihara turned to focus more on painting, upon his meeting with the French art critic Michel Tapié, Shimamoto continued to urge the leader to pursue this direction, wanting to work with Allan Kaprow, for example.
Michel Tapié was a French art critic, curator, and collector. He was an early and influential theorist and practitioner of "tachisme", a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s which is regarded as a European version of abstract expressionism. Tapié was a founder member of the Compagnie de l'Art Brut with Dubuffet and Breton In 1948, as well he managed the Foyer De l'Art Brut at the Galerie René Drouin.Tapié was from an aristocratic French family and was a second cousin once removed of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The painter's mother Adèle Tapié de Celeyran was Tapié's great-aunt.
The Gutai Art Association was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954.
Jirō Yoshihara was a Japanese painter, art educator, curator, and businessman.
Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist. She was a central figure of the Gutai Art Association from 1955 to 1965. Her works have found increased curatorial and scholarly attention across the globe since the early 2000s, when she received her first museum retrospective in Ashiya, Japan, which was followed by the first retrospective abroad, in New York and Vancouver. Her work was featured in multiple exhibitions on Gutai art in Europe and North America.
The First Gutai Art Exhibition took place in Ohara hall, Tokyo, Japan, in October 1955. This exhibition was the first manifestation of Gutai and displayed wide-ranging artworks created by a group of young artists formed around association leader Jiro Yoshihara. In the spirit of avant-garde, Gutai Artists challenged the formats, materials and boundaries of painting with innovative projects that explored space, time and sound. The group's interest was in direct emotion and direct connections between the spirit and the material with the goal of doing something completely unexpected to create art that was unrelated to the concepts of the past.
Kazuo Shiraga was a Japanese abstract painter and the first-generation member of the postwar artists collective Gutai Art Association (Gutai). As a Gutai member, he was a prolific, inventive, and pioneering experimentalist who tackled a range of media: in addition to painting, he worked in performance art, three-dimensional object making, conceptual art, and installations, many of which are preserved only in documentary photos and films.
Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D., is a curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She has produced over 40 exhibitions and published pioneering scholarship on modern and contemporary Asian art. She organized the first major North American retrospectives of artists Yayoi Kusama (1989), Daido Moriyama (1999), Yoko Ono (2000), Mu Xin (2001), Cai Guo-Qiang (2008), and Lee Ufan (2011), among others, and has brought such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, and Chinese conceptual art, as well as Japanese otaku culture, to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which the New York Times named as one of 2017’s top ten exhibitions and ARTnews named as one of the decade’s top 25 most influential shows. Credited for the far-reaching impact of her exhibitions and scholarship bolstering knowledge of postwar Japanese art history in America and Japan, she received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.
Minoru Onoda was an important member of the Gutai Group's younger generation having joined the group in 1965. His 'Paintings of Propagation' theory was a crucial step in his early career. He was included in the important retrospectives on the Gutai Group at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2013 and the National Art Center in Tokyo in 2012.
Seiko Kanno is a participant of the 'third generation' of the Gutai Art Association from the mid 1960s onward. Her paintings are often characterized by an inorganic composition, seemingly devoid of emotional expression. Kanno is also a member of an experimental, avant-garde group of poets, in which she composed highly visual poems using symbols and katakana syllables. Her work additionally suggests her admiration of music, physics and mathematics, to which she became devoted towards in her later years.
Yuko Nasaka is a Japanese avant-garde artist who is known for her involvement with the Gutai Art Association.
Saburo Murakami was a Japanese visual and performance artist. He was a member of the Gutai Art Association and is best known for his paper-breaking performances (kami-yaburi) in which he burst through kraft paper stretched on large wooden frames. Paper-breaking is a canonical work in the history of Japanese post-war art and for the history of performance art. Murakami’s work includes paintings, three-dimensional objects and installation as well as performance, and is characterized by a highly conceptual approach that transcends dualistic thinking and materializes in playful interactive forms and often thematizes time, chance and intuition.
Tsuruko Yamazaki was a Japanese artist, known for her bold artistic experiments with abstract visual styles and non-traditional materials. She was a co-founder and the longest-standing female member of the Gutai Art Association, an avant-garde artists' collective established by Jirō Yoshihara.
Sadaharu Horio was a Japanese visual and performance artist. From 1966 to 1972 he was a member of the Gutai Art Association and produced sculptural canvasses. From the late 1960s on, his work increasingly included large-scale installation artworks, performances and interventions in urban and natural environments. His performances often spontaneously involved the audience in collective creative activities. Horio became a crucial figure in the formation of an alternative and open art scene in the Kansai region. His work is characterized by a strong connection between the act of painting and everyday life, his repudiation of distinction between high and low art, and the ease and humor with which he adapted his performances and installations to changing sites and cultural contexts, making them accessible and open for different audiences.
Jikken Kōbō was one of the first avant-garde artist collectives active in postwar Japan. It was founded in Tokyo in 1951 by a group of artists working in various media. Until its disbandment in 1957, a total of fourteen members participated in the group. Members were typically in their twenties and hailed from different backgrounds – the group included not just visual artists and musicians, but also a printmaker, a lighting designer, an engineer, and others. The famous modern art critic Shūzō Takiguchi was the key mentor and promoter of the group.
Fujiko Shiraga was a Japanese avant-garde artist and one of the earliest female members of the Gutai Art Association. Active as an artist between the early 1950s and 1961, Shiraga was known for creating highly tactile artworks by pasting and creasing sheets of torn Japanese paper. Since last decade, Shiraga's works have received growing art-historical attention. Her paper works, paintings, and installations were featured in major Western exhibitions on Gutai art and two posthumous retrospectives.
Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai was a study and discussion group founded in 1952 to facilitate interdisciplinary and cross-genre exchanges among Japanese artists based in the Kansai region. Among the participants were key figures of Japanese avant-garde art after World War II, such as calligraphers Shiryū Morita, Yuichi Inoue and Sōgen Eguchi, potter Yasuo Hayashi, and painters Waichi Tsutaka, Kokuta Suda, Jirō Yoshihara and future members of the Gutai Art Association. Genbi's activities, which included monthly meetings and group exhibitions, ceased in 1957.
Reiko Tomii is a Japanese-born art historian and curator based in New York. Specializing in Japanese modern and conceptual art in its global context during the postwar period, Tomii is one of the art historians publishing in the English language on postwar Japanese art. Tomii helped organize the first North American retrospective on the work of Yayoi Kusama (1989), and collaborated closely with curator Alexandra Munroe to produce the seminal exhibition and book Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994). In 2017, Tomii's book Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan was awarded the Robert Motherwell Book Award by the Dedalus Foundation. Tomii is also co-founder and co-director of the postwar Japanese art research collective PoNJA-GenKon.
Sadamasa Motonaga was a Japanese visual artist and book illustrator, and a first-generation member of the postwar Japanese artist group Gutai Art Association, Gutai for short.
Yōzō Ukita was a Japanese artist, educator, writer and editor. Often known as a member of the Gutai Art Association from 1955 to 1964, Ukita made a major contribution in art education for children initially through his editorship of Kirin [Giraffe], a children's magazine that experimented with merging modern art and literature intended to encourage free thinking among children in postwar Japan. His association with Gutai began when he first asked the future leader Jirō Yoshihara to contribute an artwork for the cover of the magazine. Over the years he would ask other Gutai members to also contribute in this way. He thus deepened the relationship between Gutai and children's art, a topic many members were eager to address on the pages of Kirin and elsewhere.