Kazuo Shiraga

In 1952, Shiraga co-founded Zero-kai (Zero Society) with Akira Kanayama and Saburo Murakami, all members of the Shinseisaku Kyōkai, who were later joined by Atsuko Tanaka.

[9] In April 1955, Shiraga, Murakami, Kanayama and Tanaka quit Zero-kai and joined the Gutai Art Association, founded a few months earlier under the leadership of Jirō Yoshihara.

In 1959, Shiraga’s works were shown in the exhibition Fifteen Japanese Contemporary Artists Recommended by Tapié at Gendai Gallery in Tokyo, at the XI Premio Lissone internationale per la pittura in Italy, and at the Métamorphismes at Galerie Stadler in Paris.

In 1971 Shiraga entered the Tendai sect’s priesthood at the Enryaku-ji temple on Mount Hiei and committed himself to Buddhist training in Mikkyō (Esoteric Buddhism).

[18] Shiraga, who was painting and drawing landscapes and urban cityscapes in his 20s, picked up Post-Impressionist and Surrealist disfiguration in the late 1940s, inspired by European Romanticist literature and Japanese folk tales.

Around 1954, Shiraga gave up using tools and used his hands, fingers, and fingernails to smear the oil paint (predominantly monotone crimson lake red) in linear movements all over the canvasses.

[33] Around 1958 Shiraga, considering the difficulties to identify his works when sent to Europe, began to entitle his foot paintings with the names of figures from Suikoden (Water Margin),[34] a 14th-century Chinese novel about 108 warrior heroes and their violent fights for justice.

[42] In the mid-1960s, Shiraga picked up the shape of semicircles he used in his paintings and created huge objects that formally referred to Japanese sensu and ougi hand fans made of paper.

In the same yard, Shiraga, in the presence of press and photographers, at three occasions during the exhibition, stripped down to his underwear and wrestled in a heap of wall plaster and concrete.

Documented by striking photographs and film, Challenging Mud has been considered performance and action art, though Shiraga conceived it as an extension of his foot painting.

For the 2nd Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition in summer 1956, Shiraga created two works which formally and materially responded to Challenging Mud: Oval, an oval shaped heap of mud completely covered in vinyl sheet, whose organic shape and soft slick texture and hairy applications made it look like a gigantic invertebrate; and Circle, another heap of earth covered by a plastic sheet.

[44] Shiraga’s 16 Individuals, presented at the 9th Ashiya City Art Exhibition in 1956, consisted of sixteen small disk-shaped heaps of cement, all painted in different color combinations and arranged horizontally on a canvas on the floor.

After the poles fell one by one, Shiraga in a red costume and a large mask with formally exaggerated features appeared on the stage and performed his own version of sanbasō, a traditional celebratory dance of Noh and Kyōgen theater.

In his essays for the Gutai journal, Shiraga repeatedly described the importance of grasping one’s own innate sensibility, which was to be supplemented by dispositions acquired through individual experiences.

I thus concluded that my mission from now on was to reach the farthest end of this emotional direction.”[50] He thus explained his passion for impulsive bodily exertion and for the heavy, thick material of oil paint.

As the artist himself articulated: “My art needs not just beauty, but something horrible.”[51] Shiraga’s fascination with violent bodily acts, sanguinity and martiality has been understood as political engagement with the wartime past of Japan, as “coded narrative about the violence of war and the pervasiveness of violence in everyday life”[52] or, in parallel to the Japanese postwar authors of nikutai bungaku (carnal literature), as liberating “embodiment of individual freedom and subjectivity”[53] in opposition to the totalitarian militarist Japanese regime.

Shiraga has never been deployed to the front as a soldier, but he later indicated that his impressions of the devastations by World War II, which he had experienced after his return to Amagasaki, were materialized in his works.

[54] According to the artists’ own words, it was also fueled by his childhood experience of seeing injured and dead participants of danjiri cart-pulling rituals at Shinto festivities in Amagasaki and the region.

[55] Shiraga’s fascination with the closeness of bloody violence and beauty has been described as a hedonistically masochistic and “sadistic vein” in his work,[56] but also considered as fed by an understanding of martiality and the grotesque as a part of masculinity, as, for instance, represented in classic Chinese and Japanese literature and painting.