During her six-decade career, Katsura did not conform to one particular artistic genre or style, instead employing a variety of approaches including painting, mixed media collage, and caricature to depict a range of subjects using folkloric allegory, religious iconography, realism, and experiments into abstraction.
[6] Born into an upper-middle class family of samurai lineage during the Taishō Democracy in 1913, Katsura was raised in a conservative household that expected her to uphold Japan's traditional gender roles.
[4] However, she also absorbed the more individualistic mindset manifested in Western cultural products such as books and music brought home by Katsura's father, a professor of engineering at the Tokyo Imperial University who had received his education in Europe.
Having long been a "collecto-maniac," Katsura began to incorporate unconventional subjects into her work in the early 1930s, such as crumpled leaves, cork shavings, wood grain, rope, and Japanese kasuri fabric.
[15] These inventive explorations allowed Katsura to make a name for herself in art circles, and by the age of 22 she had held two solo exhibitions in Tokyo—the first with the support of painter Ebihara Kinosuke at Kindai Gallery in 1935, and the second at Galerie Nichido in 1938, upon recommendation of her teacher Fujita Tsuguharu.
[8][12] During this period, Katsura combined mixed media collage and realism to investigate the position of women and female creativity within a patriarchal society, such as Letter (1936), Diary (1938/1979), Genji (1938/1979), and Crown (1939/1979).
[20] Katsura continued to paint as much as she could during the Asia Pacific War, though materials quickly became scarce and the state's co-option of Japan's leading artists to contribute to wartime propaganda was imminent.
That same year, she also turned down fellow female artist Hasegawa Haruko's invitation to organize the women's wing of the Army Art Association (Rikugun Bijutsu Kyōkai).
[12][8] In 1948, Katsura participated in the literary-artistic group, Yoru no Kai (Night Society), organized by renowned surrealist artist Tarō Okamoto to foster ties between avant-garde art and literature.
[26] She made many works that strongly critiqued society at this time, such as Piling Up (1951), Resistance (1952), March (1952), History of Mankind (1953), Women's Day (1953), Towering Rage (1953), Human and Fish (1954), and We’re all Suffering (1954).
[27] Similarly, Namiko Kunimoto analyzed Women's Day (1953), asserting that Katsura's painting demonstrates an ambiguous reaction to the promises of female equality, writing that it "conveys the double registers of hope and confusion predominant in the postwar period.
[2] Between 1956 and 1961, Katsura moved away from Japan for the first time, living in Paris, France, and New York City, USA, as well as spending several months in the village of Bambari in the Central African Republic.
"[29] She spent two years traveling and exhibiting in Europe with Paris as her home base, and even displayed a painting in a group show next to works by Pablo Picasso and Jean Arp.
In June 1956, Katsura moved to New York City, where she set up her studio and experimented with abstraction and materiality for almost three years, using washi paper and oil paint to create large-scale mixed media collages.
From 1963 to 1964, she illustrated the serialized translation of James Baldwin's novel Another Country for the Asahi Journal, taking on themes of interracial relationships and homosexuality that were considered highly taboo in Japan.
[25][23] Katsura returned to cartoon-like social satire in the late 1960s, with works that employed mixed-media collage and meticulous representations of accumulated newspaper and banknote fragments depicting people as subhuman creatures drowning in layers of information and commodities.