Hikosaka's youth was marked by health issues, suffering from tuberculosis and witnessing his younger brother's struggle with cerebral palsy.
[2] He experienced hospitalizing bouts of pleurisy and during the long periods of convalescence he read many books such as Soren Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death demonstrating an early interest in philosophy which would inform his future artistic practice.
[1] Along with this radical shift in his perception of art, at the university he also experienced the anti-war, anti-establishment, student protest movements associated with Zenkyoto that had spread all over Japan in the late 1960s.
The first form of artistic gesture of this exhibition was to stretch the wooden stretcher bars with transparent plastic vinyl so that the wall beneath remained visible when hung.
[1][3] While the school was barricaded during the exhibitions, many people were still able to see it such as Haruo Fukuzumi, then editor of Bijutsu Techō, and Tama Art University teachers Yoshishige Saito, Yoshiaki Tono, and Yusuke Nakahara.
[3] In July 1969 Bikyōtō, short for Bijutsu Kyoto Kaigi (Artists Joint-Struggle Committee), was founded around Hikosaka and his fellow Tama Art University friend, Hori Kosai.
[1] Initially, Hikosaka had planned to use plaster, a traditional art material, for this work in order turn the floor of his room white.
[1] Hikosaka cites the depression that followed the failure of the first Bikyōtō as artistic inspiration for turning his room white (a color symbolic of death in Japanese culture).
[1] Within this gesture, which demands reconsideration of both spatial phenomenology and the theoretical tenets of an artwork simultaneously, the imperative to address the “internal institution” that is at once perceptual and ideological becomes apparent.
Depicting both the act of making and subsequent reflection upon creation by Hikosaka, the photographs enable the viewer to share the artist's contemplative and phenomenological discovery that unfolds over time.
He is perhaps most known in this regard for his “Critiquing Lee Ufan—Fascism based on the internal crisis of ‘expression’,” published in Dezain Hihyō (Design Review) in November of 1970, where he accused Lee of “apolitical mysticism that suppressed human agency amid the crisis of expression in the late 1960s.”[13][14] Elsewhere Hikosaka has critiqued the material approach of Mono-ha, arguing that it cannot account for differences in information.
[17] He defines praxis as where “the activity itself is the purpose” and is one “based on ‘living together’—that is, on human relations.”[16] Here we also gain in this article an insight into Hikosaka's praxis-oriented approach and the influence of Gutai's instruction to “never copy others” on arriving at this conviction.
Hikosaka writes, “I was driven crazy by this instruction, which led me into a trap of my own making, in which I believed that there was ‘nothing more I could do.’ But this process of getting caught in my own trap still possessed a phase of ‘art.’ Although I shall not mention the process in detail here, it did allow me, by means of practice arising from the art phase, to glimpse the depth of the domain of nonartwork.”[18] He goes on to write of his “attitude of adhering to nonproductive acts and the depth of the domain of nonartwork.”[18] This attitude appears in Bikyōtō Revolution Committee's vow as a collectivist endeavor to abstain from art making for one year, declared the month following the publication of “Beyond the Closed Circle.” From 1972 to 1977 Hikosaka edited two journals related to Bikyōtō: Kirokutai: Art & Document and Bijutsu shihyō, in which much of Bikyōtō associated critical texts appeared.
[20] This transdisciplinary group of painters, designers and one photographer deconstructed the medium of photography while simultaneously interrogating the space between individual and collective expression.
[24] The statement reads, “[These] six have founded the second Bikyōtō Revolution Committee and agreed that during the coming year of 1974 they will perform no activity related to the production and exhibition of works.
Based on this agreement, the present exhibition is organized and the works shown here are produced.”[24] During this period, Hikosaka stayed at the Zen Buddhist temple Rinsho-ji in Gunma prefecture, the childhood home of his then-wife Masako Shibata.
[11] According to Alexandra Munroe, “Hikosaka's choice to construct paintings on wood that involved craft, design and color challenged what some critics saw as Mono-ha's excessive anti-formalism and mystical whimsy” and was “a sincere attempt to forge a regenerative, not destructive, post-avant-garde art.”[25] Hikosaka was featured in the Queens Museum's landmark 1999 exhibition, “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s” along with Yutaka Matsuzawa, Yoko Ono, Genpei Akasegawa, Yasunao Tone, Hori Kosai and Nomura Hitoshi.