Kazuo Shiraga

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga (1924-2008, Japan) in Hong Kong.

Shiraga’s artistic quest is driven by the desire to materialize bodily and spiritual energy without denying the essential qualities of matter. This led him to invent his own form of action painting and live art happenings. In the performance “Challenging Mud” (1955) Shiraga dives into a pile of mud and sculpts it with his body. This was a ground-breaking attempt to replace the conventional notion of painting with the idea that the action itself generates art. Shiraga’s “painting” is a field of pure action. This idea not only makes him a predecessor of the development of happenings and of performance art, but also links his work to Abstract Expressionist painting, then prominent in the United States.

Shiraga is one of the founders of the Gutai Art Association, a Japanese post-war avant-garde movement (1954-1972). Gutai was centered around leader Jiro Yoshihara who encouraged the members to “be original” and to create something that has never been created before in a manner that has never been used before. It was the artists’ goal to start anew from a blank space after the disasters of the World War. The word gutai means “concreteness” or “embodiment”. This reflects the group’s strong interest in matter and in the creative process. Gutai artists delved into developing new processes of making artworks crisscrossing various artistic media and techniques. Each member of the group broke through the boundaries of the traditional definition of painting and sculpture. As much as they tried to respond to the climate of post-war Japan, their works still speak to us going beyond time and space.