In the 20th century, Japan was scarred by war and marked by anxiety and alienation. Throughout the nation’s rapid industrialization and modernization, the radical women artists of the post-war period created work that demonstrated their conviction that art could liberate them and change society. They included some of the most important artists in the world, such as Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, and Ruth Asawa.
Against this backdrop, Mudam Luxembourg’s landmark exhibition “Kaihō: Japanese Women Artists after 1945” brings together more than 120 works by 39 of these artists. The accompanying catalogue, published by Phaidon in English, goes even deeper to reassess the ways these artists, many of whose work has never been seen outside Japan, contributed to major art movements.
Japanese women’s political agency and sexual autonomy came relatively late, compared to Western countries. They voted for the first time in 1946. Birth control pills were only legalized in Japan in 1999. Despite the setbacks, several works in “Kaihō” question the reproductive and caregiving roles traditionally assigned to women. In a video called Portrait (1998), artists Yoshiko Shimada and BuBu de la Madeleine pose as a U.S. Occupation soldier and a sex worker serving the Occupation forces, respectively, using drag as a tool to critique colonial history.
Mudam’s curatorial team, led by Florence Ostende and assisted by Yurika Imaseki and Anaël Daoud, have been mindful of including lesser-known diaspora artists such as painter Tomie Ohtake, who migrated to São Paulo in 1936, forging a successful career there. Also included is the second-generation Okinawan Japanese artist from Hawaii, Toshiko Takaezu, whose ceramic “Moons” sit quietly in the corner of the final room, evoking “an elemental continuum of sky, volcanic earth, and Pacific Ocean,” according to the gallery caption.
“You could see this show as a manifesto of how we should be looking for global modernism,” Ostende told Artsy. “All sense of national borders and limitations were challenged. These artists did not necessarily concede to Japan’s national identity. They really exploded the boundaries.”
Here are 10 post-war Japanese women artists you need to know.
Taeko Tomiyama
B. 1921, Kobe, Japan. D. 2021, Tokyo.
Taeko Tomiyama firmly believed that art could transform society. Having spent her childhood in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, she returned to her own country in the final years of the war. Her early lithographic works documented unemployed coal miners in the 1950s during Japan’s energy revolution. She became involved in the Japan–Korea solidarity movement in the ’70s and ’80s, supporting Korean political prisoners. The artist also made a series of lithographs in protest of the violent suppression of Gwangju’s pro-democracy movement in May 1980, some of which are displayed in the gallery.
A standout work in the Mudam show is Tomiyama’s exquisitely detailed, harrowing painting, The Night of the Festival of Galungan (1986). Part of her “Memory of the Sea” series, it addresses the subject of Korean “comfort women” forced to serve the Japanese military. The dark oil painting depicts the world of the dead, a throng of skeletons on one side, garishly painted masks on the other. Lower down, women’s splayed legs are served up on a plate ceremoniously. They are all coming to haunt the terrified Japanese soldiers at the bottom of the painting.
B. 1924, Toyohashi, Japan. D. 1966, Tokyo.
Saori Akutagawa originally trained as a singer, but when her husband, a composer whom she met at Tokyo College of Music, complained about her singing, she turned to “the silent art of painting.” By the 1950s, she had found the outlet she needed to express “something burning inside.” Her dye-on-cloth pieces Woman (B) and Woman (I) (both 1955) open the Mudam show, immediately pulling in viewers with their bold, vivid colors. Akutagawa once said she wanted to “rekindle the laughter of ancient deities in the modern world.” Woman A, The Hawk and Princess Kasuga (1955), appears to be an abstracted portrait of the artist herself, its angular shapes bursting with explosive energy.
Akutagawa would later divorce her husband. After briefly studying in L.A., she moved to New York in the 1960s. Gaining momentum in abstraction, she exhibited alongside Kusama and Yuki Katsura, using her maiden name, Yamada. Sadly, she passed away soon after at the age of 42.
B. 1929, Sabae, Japan. D. 2025, Düsseldorf.
Grinder Chess, circa 1964
Takako Saito
Doyle
Untitled (Handstamped Drawing), 1985
Takako Saito
OSMOS
After moving to New York in the early ’60s, the self-taught artist and former teacher Takako Saito became part of the Fluxus movement, joining other Japanese women artists, such as Ono, Shigeko Kubota, and Mieko Shiomi.
Fluxus suited her carefree spirit and disdain for convention. Her playful works, such as Sound Chess (1964), a large chess set with pieces only distinguishable by the sound they make, are displayed in the Mudam’s expansive foyer, alongside Ono’s Mend Piece (1966/2026) and Refugee Boat (1960/2026). In the interactive series of carved wooden heads, Spielkopf (1966–87), the viewer can drop a small bead into a sculpted head, which rolls down inside it, then pops back out unexpectedly from a different hole each time.
In another gallery, Saito’s Freedom Portraitspiel No. 4 (1992), a sculpture made of pinecones, stones, and wooden squares, arranged whimsically in a shiny metal box, is on view. Large ears stick out on each side, while small black-and-white cubes, reminiscent of her Sound Chess, are draped along the bottom as if a piece of jewelry.
B. 1932, Osaka. D. 2024, Osaka.
Kimiyo Mishima’s delicate trompe l’oeil sculptures take up a large part of one of the galleries. Dissatisfied with the collages she had been making using collected newspaper clippings, she began transforming them into printed or painted ceramics. These works replicated everyday objects or items of trash in the ’70s, some expanding in scale in the ’80s, as in her Coca-Cola Box (1986). “To me, the most interesting thing about ceramics was that it breaks,” Mishima said. The artist was living through Japan’s rapid economic growth and emerging information society, whose anxieties around endless news cycles find an echo today in the rise of AI. “All information instantly becomes trash as soon as it is consumed,” reads a quote next to the artwork.
Mishima’s childhood was shaped by war. Seeing her hometown in Osaka destroyed after emerging from an air raid shelter one day had a lasting impact. Although her husband, Shigeji Mishima, was part of the avant-garde group Gutai, Mishima chose to work independently, forging her own path to self-expression.
B. 1932, Osaka. D. 2005, Nara, Japan.
Work (TO1018), 1970
Atsuko Tanaka
Whitestone Gallery
Two large-scale paintings by Atsuko Tanaka dominate the gallery dedicated to new forms of abstraction. Thick with clashing colors and drizzles of paints over abstract circles, they are delightfully barmy and reflect her interest in networks, flows, and circularity. The works brim with energy and possibility. Her Work (Bell) (1955), which the artist would call “her invisible painting,” consists of 20 electric alarm bells connected by electrical wiring and cords. At Mudam, this has been installed across the carpeted floor in front of her colorful paintings. When the push-button switch attached to the work is activated by a visitor, a loud sound is emitted, forcing us to pay attention and really “see” her work, perhaps for the first time.
Celebrated for her conceptual and performance works, including the 1956 Denkifuku (Electric Dress) in which she draped her body in hundreds of fluorescent light bulbs, Tanaka was a core member of the Gutai Association. Round of Sand (1968), a film shot on a beach of Awaji Island and displayed in a gallery dedicated to the environment, we see Tanaka drawing concentric circles into the sand. She carries on drawing despite incoming waves repeatedly erasing her work. The work is emblematic of Gutai’s concerns with the dissolution of fixed form and the body’s intervention in material.
B. 1937, Niigata, Japan. D. 2015, New York.
Chess II, 1975
Shigeko Kubota
Galerie Hubert Winter
Shigeko Kubota was overshadowed by her more famous artist husband, Nam June Paik, but she was a pioneer of video art in her own right. In 1964, she left Japan for New York, having been disappointed by the reception of her immersive solo show in Tokyo. She joined the Fluxus group and began making video installations, incorporating mirrors and water to convey her concept of “liquid reality.”
In Niagara Falls (1985–87), CRT monitors, mirrors, and other reflective surfaces are arranged in a violent cascade, against which water flows into a tank filled with shards of broken glass. The work also includes amplified sounds of waterfalls, giving the installation a dangerous feeling, and references the precarity of nature’s commodification into a tourist destination. Later in life, Kubota made work about her experience of caring for Paik, following his stroke in 1996. Bringing the ups and downs of life into art was the very essence of Fluxus.
Sayako Kishimoto
B. 1939, Nagoya, Japan. D. 1988, Nagoya.
Instead of signing her paintings with her name, Sayako Kishimoto drew an inverted triangle to denote her fervent belief that what is at the bottom of society should be placed at the top. Her magnificent, 19-meter-long scroll, 21c. Erotica Flying Machines – A Trip to the Galaxy (1983), originally a backdrop for her own live performances, has been reproduced for this exhibition. It depicts an elaborate cosmic allegory, a world inhabited by grasshoppers and butterflies, a place of love and freedom.
In the series of paintings “Erotical Girls” (1983), names of women like Pansy or Dogtooth Violet are incorporated into the titles. These women are painted in bright colors, their faces heavily made up: kitsch, unnatural, and grotesque. A nearby TV monitor shows a televised address as part of her 1983 campaign for the House of Councilors. In the video, Kishimoto asks for voter support, representing Zatsuminto (Miscellaneous People’s Party), a minority Japanese political party founded and led by LGBTQ+ and social activist Takeshi “Ken” Togo. “The suppression of gay people equals the suppression of freedom of all people,” she says.
Kishimoto briefly joined the Neo-Dada Organizers as the only female member of the group in 1960, while she was still a student at Tama Art University. She moved back to her hometown of Nagoya when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 40. The cancer would take her life nine years later.
Tāri Itō
B. 1951, Tokyo. D. 2021, Tokyo.
Like Kishimoto, Tāri Itō was a pioneering performance artist and social activist, her work exploring embodied resistance and questioning normative gender identity. In her performance, Self-Portrait (1996), latex rubber becomes Itō’s second skin, as she blows air through a pipe to expand different areas of her body, while asking directly to the camera, “Who are you?” She answers the question herself: “I am not married; I have no child.” Finally, she reveals that she is a lesbian. Itō is quoted in the exhibition catalogue saying that her performances, like Me Being Me (1996), gave her “great joy.” She built networks of like-minded artists and activists in Japan, Europe, East and Southeast Asia, eventually founding the Women’s Art Network (WAN, 1994–2008) back in Japan.
The triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power meltdown on March 11, 2011, led Itō to make one of her final performance works, I guess it’s better that radiation doesn’t have color …Sigh (2011), in which she used LED lights and fluorescent-painted latex and onions to make visible the fear of radiation. Despite the degenerative neurological illness she developed in her later years, she still joined demonstrations and participated in group exhibitions, the last of which was in 2019.
B. 1953, Okinawa, Japan. Lives and works in Okinawa.
Setting out to photograph American soldiers in her hometown Okinawa’s military bases, Mao Ishikawa was soon drawn to the women working in bars in Japan’s Koza City and Kin Town, catering to the men’s needs. She wanted to capture the Okinawan women who lived “freely and uninhibitedly,” defying social contempt. Ishikawa’s early work, Red Flowers (Akabanaa) (1975–77), some of which are displayed in the exhibition, shows these women at ease in Ishikawa’s gaze, sometimes looking straight back at the lens.
In a transitional section of the gallery, where the postcard-size portraits of all 39 artists are displayed, we see Ishikawa’s black-and-white self-portrait, taken after surviving cancer in 2001–02. In this photo, scars on her body are painfully visible. Her lifelong inquiry into what it means to be an Okinawan, as distinct and separate from the imposed national identity, led to her series “Here’s What the Japanese Flag Means to Me” (1993–2011), made in collaboration with the Ainu people, Burakumin, Taiwanese, and Korean residents in Japan. In her ongoing, large-scale photographic project, The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll (2014–present), her friends and family reenact scenes from Okinawa’s history.
B. 1959, Tokyo. Lives and works in New York.
Utsusemi, 2018
Nobuho Nagasawa
Japan Society Benefit Auction
Informed by her nomadic, multicultural upbringing, Nobuho Nagasawa’s work challenges a nationalist framing of identity. The artist is known for her participatory site-responsive installations that could be climbed over and even inhabited.
Nagasawa studied art, critical theory, and music in Berlin and California, spending time in Tokoname, Japan, where she studied under the ceramist Ryoji Koie, and eventually settling in New York. The artist sees ecology as inseparable from art. Her later works adapt LED technology and fiber-optic cables. In her 2013 TED Talk, Nagasawa said, “I combine the natural world—rain, wind, waves, and bird songs with human sounds, like heartbeat and voices, and I transform them into light.”
In 2023, her early earthworks Noyaki (1984) and Navel of the Earth (1985) were included in the Mori Art Museum’s 20th-anniversary exhibition, “Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living.” In a grainy video on view in the Mudam show, the artist is shown creating one of her earthworks with a group of Tokoname residents—laughing, shouting, and being herself.
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