Curated by Walker visual arts curator Doryun Chong, in close collaboration with Hiroko Kudo, the artist’s widow and executor of the estate, the retrospective exhibition will feature some 70 works of diverse media—objects, sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting—covering the entire trajectory of Kudo’s productive career, from the late 1950s through the late 1980s.

Many works will be borrowed from some of the most important museums in Japan and Europe, as well as from private collections. The Walker is publishing a comprehensive catalogue to accompany the exhibition, the first full-length study of the artist’s work in any Western language.

Tetsumi Kudo was a rare artist who bridged many disparate artistic tendencies in the latter half of the 20th century—including French Nouveau Realisme, international Fluxus, Pop art, 1960s anti-art tendencies, and 1980s Japanese postmodernism—without specifically belonging to any of them. Throughout his life and career, he remained an eccentric and enigmatic figure in postwar art. In his stance and approach, temperament, and philosophy, the contemporary artists he perhaps shared most with were figures like Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, James Lee Byars, and Yayoi Kusama. But the significance of Kudo’s work lies not only in art history but more generally in postwar culture and thought. Throughout his career, he remained particularly Japanese, while his art and vision were consistently and uniquely transcultural, international, and cosmopolitan.

Deeply concerned with the fate of humanity in the wake of nuclear attacks on his native land and the dawn of the global arms race, Kudo determinedly sought to develop a univ rsal humanist language of creativity and regeneration until his untimely death in 1990.

Although Kudo’s work has been featured in benchmark historical exhibitions, such as Japon des avant-gardes 1910–1970 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1986) and Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1994), the artist has never been the subject of a one-person exhibition outside Europe and Japan. The only comprehensive retrospective of his work, organized by the National Museum of Art, Osaka, took place more than a decade ago.

Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis aims not only to introduce this important artist to new audiences, but to contribute to the ongoing revision of the narrative of postwar international art. The exhibition will include a study room, in which viewers can explore the timeline of the artist’s life and work and examine historical documentation, posters, and ephemera, as well as studies for some of his larger-scale works.

The Artist

Born in Osaka in 1935 and raised in Aomori, located in the northern end of the main island of Japan, Kudo came of age in the late 1950s when Japan began to experience a return of the traumas and discontents which had been suppressed during more than a decade of military occupation, political stability, and economic growth following the devastation of World War II. He made a name for himself early on with his evocative and sensuous, often grotesque objects and shocking performances. In 1962, he stunned the Tokyo art world with his installation titled The Philosophy of Impotence, in which he filled an entire gallery with objects resembling phalluses that symbolized, in his own words, the “pathetic despair of human efforts.”

In the same year, just as he was gaining exposure and notoriety, Kudo immigrated to Paris. But fittingly for someone with a radical mindset, the artist soon became disenchanted with the Parisian art world and postwar European humanism; he quickly embarked on developing a practice that confronted and critiqued the Western dualistic way of viewing humanity in opposition to nature or technology. His Your Portrait series, which he began in 1963 and continued through the 1970s, consisted of sculptural fragments of the human body—face, hands, brain, heart, penis—trapped inside bird cages, fish tanks, and wooden boxes in the shape of dice. He often mixed these with found everyday objects. He provocatively declared, “I wanted to tell Europeans that humanism and love and sex are virtually on the same dimension as such mundane commodities as instant soup or cigarettes.”

Kudo’s lurid and even morbid works did not represent a pessimistic or cynical vision, however. In his unique version of humanism, the artist viewed human beings no differently than lower, simpler organisms that exist within a perpetual “proliferating chain reaction.” At the same time, unlike many postwar artists and thinkers, Kudo did not hold a negative view of the irreversible tides of modernity; for him, the “pollution” of the human body and society by science and technology, consumerism and commodities, could create new hybrid forms of existence and turn the landscape of humankind and civilization into a “new ecology.”

In the last decade of his life, Kudo sharply shifted the orientation of his art, seeking to bridge Japan and the West, as well as to dissect Japanese culture and society more explicitly. His work began to appear less visceral, and instead more abstract and contemplative. It even addressed the usually off-limit subject of the Japanese Emperor system; he considered it to be at the center—or the black hole—of Japanese culture, society, and spirituality. His earlier performances and Happenings evolved into what the artist called “Ceremonies”: he appeared as a cross between a Buddhist monk and a Shinto priest, meditating with objects. In 1987, he was appointed professor at his alma mater, the Tokyo University of Fine Art. In November 1990, Tetsumi Kudo died of cancer. -- www.walkerart.org