[5] Their aesthetic, violent even nihilistic works,[6] as well as their iconoclastic theoretical ambition brings them in line with the Anti-Art movement (Han-geijutsu), having notably exhibited in Yomiuri Independent, a hotbed of this trend.
[10] Other core members include Mitsuko Tabe, Yoriko Chō, Takeshi Owari, Hidesuke Obata, Aiko Ōguro, Uichi Ōyama, Junnosuke Miyazaki, Shigeharu Obana, Toku Yonekura, and Toshio Taniguchi.
[11] Other artists have also participated, more or less temporarily, in the activities of the group: Yōji Kuroki, Ken'ichirō Terada, Shin Kinoshita, Seiryō Surusumi, Hidesaburō Saitō, Yoshiharu Funaki, Yutaka Yagara, Masatoshi Katae, Sumio Morigana.
[14] Reacting against what they saw as a stifling exhibition system that relied on personal connections and master-disciple relationships, they put great energy into fighting against the various institutions of the art establishment.
Kyūshū-ha was a group of painters residing in and around Fukuoka, who were first and foremost seikatsu-sha and rōdō-sha (blue-collar workers and other wage earners) strongly motivated by the collective creation of a "movement" (undō).
Sakurai's plan to expand the membership met resistance; Terada was forced out because he continued to participate in the exhibitions of Nika; as a result, three primary members, Ochi, Kikuhata, and Yamauchi, left and organized Dōkutsu-ha (Cave School) in late 1959.
[7] Unlike Pop artists which used the products of contemporary society to critique life dominated by mass production and mass consumption as impersonal, Kyūshū-ha artists embraced articles simply and manually made and used at farming villages, such as mushiro straw mats (Ishibashi); sudare reed blinds, cigarette butts, screens (Ochi); and ropes (Tabe).
In his sometimes menacing objets, he shed the strategy of early Kyūshū-ha, which deployed a copious amount of material and produced huge works in order to shock the viewer.
[6] The desperate nihilism found in these works strikes a very different chord from the earlier Kyūshū-ha, which was characterized by primal energy and an optimistic impulse for destruction.
[6] Happenings that involved bodily acts became a major element that characterized the late-middle period which climaxed at A Grand Meeting of Heroes staged at the Momoji swimming beach in November 1962.
[8] They performed a series of happenings composing what they called a “festival of darkness” (yami no shukusai),[22] including Obata's slaughtering of chickens, Ōyama's burning of an altar made of junk objects, Tabe's driving of nails into the heads of mannequins, Junnosuke's holes digging on the sand beach.
[23] The Group held the second Kyūshū-ha exhibition in its hometown, Fukuoka, in December 1963, at the Shinten Kaikan hall, but the attention of the critics and the art world had already waned.
Sakurai left Japan when he quit the Nishi-Nippon newspaper company after the long-winded labor dispute that lasted half a year and move to the U.S. in March 1965.
[25] Sakurai echoed Matano in criticizing conventional painting for its "inability to jettison atmospheric [effects]" and expressed his desire to establish "a new idea of humanity supported by a new ethic that is clearly manifested.
The freeing up of gesture was another legacy of L'Art Informel, and the members of Group Kyūshū took to it with great verve, throwing, dripping, and breaking material, sometimes destroying the work in the process.
[28] This qualification (next to more famous artist groups such as Neo Dada or Hi-Red Center) highlights the relative success of Kyushu's strategy to reach out to the Tokyo scene.
";[29] or when the artist Akasegawa Genpei created an illustration for art magazine Bijutsu techō, representing the group as a huge bottle of shōchū liquor (the drink of choice in Kyūshū), labeled "Kyūshū-ha" and plunked down on a wood counter bearing the inscription "Tokyo".