Genpei Akasegawa

Genpei Akasegawa (赤瀬川原平, 1937 — 2014) was a Japanese conceptual artist, printmaker, novelist, photographer, essayist, and one of the founding figures of the Tokyo postwar avant-garde. Born in Yokohama in 1937 as Akasegawa Katsuhiko, he adopted the given name Genpei as his artistic pseudonym and remained committed to the multi-disciplinary mode of practice — visual art, performance, criticism, fiction — that defined the Tokyo Anti-Art generation of the 1960s. Across more than five decades of working life he produced one of the most varied and intellectually ambitious bodies of work in postwar Japanese culture, recognised both within the visual-art establishment and within Japanese popular culture.

Akasegawa emerged in the early 1960s through participation in the Yomiuri Independent exhibitions and the avant-garde Neo-Dada Organizers group. In 1963 he co-founded Hi Red Center alongside Jiro Takamatsu and Natsuyuki Nakanishi (the group's name a portmanteau of the artists' surname kanji: taka 高 / aka 赤 / naka 中). Hi Red Center staged a sequence of street-level events in Ginza and elsewhere — including the 'Cleaning Event' of October 1964, in which the group, dressed in white lab coats, meticulously polished a small section of Ginza pavement — that ran parallel to Fluxus activity in Europe and the United States, with which the group became closely affiliated. The event was re-staged in New York in 1966 as part of a Fluxus festival organised by George Maciunas at Grand Army Plaza, formalising Hi Red Center's place in the international avant-garde network of the period.

The pivotal episode in Akasegawa's career came with the 'Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident.' Beginning in 1963, Akasegawa produced printed works modelled on the Japanese 1,000-yen banknote — first as art objects circulated within his circle, then as multi-purpose 'invitations' to art events. He came under investigation in 1964 and was prosecuted under the law against imitating currency; the resulting trial, which opened in 1966 and in which Akasegawa argued that art-objects modelled on banknotes were not counterfeits but works of art, became a landmark in postwar Japanese debate over the boundaries between commerce and culture and between law and art. He was found guilty in 1967 and given a suspended sentence, and the conviction was upheld on final appeal in 1970; the case made him a national figure and remained a touchstone in his subsequent practice.

Akasegawa's printmaking was embedded in his wider conceptual practice. The Fluxus multiples and printed editions that documented Hi Red Center's activities in 1965-66 sit at the foundational layer of postwar Japanese conceptual printmaking, and later in his career he continued to make editioned prints that translated his ongoing philosophical engagement with everyday-life perception into graphic form. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which holds Hi Red Center collaborative pieces alongside individual works.

In 1986 Akasegawa co-founded the Rojō Kansatsu Gakkai (Street Observation Society) with the architect Terunobu Fujimori — a group that documented overlooked urban architectural elements (vestigial staircases, fragments of older buildings, anomalies in the streetscape) under the term 'Thomassons.' The Society's photographic and essayistic output became a substantial parallel practice and contributed to a wider vocabulary of urban observation. Akasegawa won the Akutagawa Prize for fiction in 1981 for his short story 'Father Disappeared' (Chichi ga kieta), published under the pen name Katsuhiko Otsuji, and produced numerous books over the course of his life.

Akasegawa died in 2014 at the age of 77. Beyond the Museum of Modern Art, his work has been the subject of major retrospectives in Japan, including 'Genpei Akasegawa: The Principles of Art,' shown at the Chiba City Museum of Art, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Oita City Art Museum. Within the Japanese postwar avant-garde Akasegawa occupies a distinctive position as the figure who most fully bridged Hi Red Center's street-level activity, the formal interrogation of art-versus-commerce represented by the 1,000-yen-note case, the everyday-life observation of the Street Observation Society, and a substantial parallel literary practice. His work continues to be handled by galleries in Tokyo and internationally, including Whitestone Gallery and SCAI The Bathhouse.