She was known as both a founding member of the Tokyo-based postwar avant-garde artist collective Jikken Kōbō and was recruited into Art Informel circles by the critic Michel Tapié during his 1957 trip to Japan.
[1][2] As a member of Jikken Kōbō she participated in art exhibitions, designed visuals for slide shows and costumes and set pieces for dances, theatrical performances, and recitals.
[6] She graduated from Bunka Gakuin in 1943, and like many other artists of her generation, never underwent the formal western-style training in drawing and copying techniques that was commonly taught in art schools.
She participated in the third iteration of the Women’s Painting Association’s (Joryū Gaka Kyōkai) annual exhibition in 1949, alongside such painters as Yuki Katsura and Aiko Katatani.
In 1951, Fukushima became a founding member of the Tokyo-based 1950s avant-garde collective Jikken Kōbō, an experimental multi-disciplinary and technologically-inclined group for whom Takiguchi served as mentor.
[17][18][19] The group's activities were inspired by the European Dadaists, Surrealists, and Bauhaus—movements in which Takiguchi was most deeply invested, but responded to the specific circumstances of 1950s Tokyo, recovering as it was from the war defeat and destruction.
In spite of Fukushima's prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, with critics and curators including Shūzō Takiguchi, Michel Tapié, and Atsushi Miyakawa discussing and promoting her work, by the 1980s she was rarely featured in the Japanese art press despite her continued gallery exhibitions.
In 2012, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, presented a collection exhibition focused on Hideko Fukushima, allowing audiences the first opportunity in two decades to see a more comprehensive body of her work.
[30][31][32] Art historian Izumi Nakajima cites three artists as Fukushima's influences in her early painting practice, namely Masanori Murai, Nobuya Abe, and Paul Klee.
As art historian Bert Winther-Tamaki has argued, this was closely tied to attempts by artists to reject wartime rhetoric that emphasized spirit over corporeal life, encouraging young soldiers to give up their lives for the continuity of the Japanese spirit-as-nation-state, realized most pointedly in Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita's paintings of bodies strewn across battlefields, blending with each other and with the earth into monotone masses (ex: Attu Island Gokusai, 1943).
[37] As Fukushima's practice develops through the mid-to-late 1960s, and as she begins incorporating the stamping process into her work, those paintings that still appear to maintain some similarity to face-like forms become much more deconstructed, darker, less mobile, and less playful, such as Untitled (1955), Visitor (1956), and An Offering (1957).
As the critic Atsushi Miyakawa quoted Fukushima as stating in a feature on her practice for the August 1963 issue of the art magazine Bijutsu techō, "I had serious doubts about the act of painting.
"[18] Nakajima takes this reading a step further to argue that Fukushima rejects both the thoughtless automatism of Surrealism, instead relying on a deeply internal, bodily-led rhythms to guide movements that are at once materially based and void of the emotiveness painters like Nobuya Abe had introduced into their abstract works by the mid-1950s.
[4] Similarly, in spite of Fukushima's having been picked up by Michel Tapié as part of his advocacy of Art Informel, Nakajima argues that Fukushima's concerns were actually a difficult fit with the common assumptions of individual expression, bold painterly action, and emotive mark-making that prevailed in action painting circles including Art Informel and the American Abstract Expressionist movement.