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 as Tsuneyuki Katsuhiko (his given name), he adopted the pseudonym Akasegawa Genpei early in his career 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' (1964), in which the group meticulously polished a small section of Ginza pavement — that paralleled and predated comparable Fluxus activities in Europe and the United States. The 'Cleaning Event' was subsequently re-staged in New York in 1966, 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. The Tokyo authorities charged him in 1965 with creating imitation banknotes; the resulting court case, 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 ultimately convicted, but the case made him a national figure and remained a touchstone in his subsequent practice.

Akasegawa's printmaking, while embedded in his wider conceptual practice, includes substantial editioned silkscreen and offset-lithograph output. The Hi Red Center collaborative offset lithographs of 1965-66 (works such as 'Bundle of Events' and the 1966 New York piece) sit at the foundational layer of postwar Japanese conceptual printmaking. Later in his career he produced editioned screenprints including 'When shadows cross border' (1988, edition of 50, 25 × 37 cm), 'The Record of Wind 2/8' (1988), and other works that translate his ongoing philosophical engagement with everyday-life perception into editioned graphic form. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), which holds Hi Red Center collaborative pieces alongside individual works.