Discover the radical aesthetic experimentation of these Japanese photographers

A clutch of exhibitions in recent years serves to remind us that the half-decade leading up to the millennium in Japan may have been one of the most artistically liberating and productive of the 20th century. However, among the artists canonised for their articulations of an anarchic, anti-Western, avant-garde, the majority are, unsurprisingly, men.

‘Kaihō: Japanese Women Artists after 1945’, at Mudam Luxembourg until 14 February 2027, is a delight of a counterpoise. Focusing on a period of significant social change, the exhibition, which will later travel to Munich’s Lenbachhaus and Guggenheim Bilbao, explores various radical modes of artistic expression from female artists that emerged both in Japan and its global communities from 1945 to the turn of the century.

The exhibition picks up in the rubble of postwar Japan, where visitors are met with The Hiroshima Panels (1950-1982), a monumental folding polyptych or byōbu of 15 paintings completed by Toshi and Iri Maruki over 32 years. The scale is imposing, impressing on the viewer the magnitude of the Hiroshima tragedy and the grief that hung heavy in the years that followed. 'This work also carries a history of censorship,' curator Florence Ostende tells Wallpaper*. 'The Marukis began painting it while US occupational powers restricted how the atomic bombings could be depicted, which I think is quite extraordinary.'

Kaihō means ‘breaking free’ in Japanese, and for all its dealings with sexuality, body politics and shifting relations to the nation-state, the exhibition embodies this entirely. But still, Ostende resists the urge to treat the end of the Second World War as a total abscission. Within a broader reorientation of post-war memory, artists like Yoshiko Shimada bore the weight of historical responsibility in confronting Japan’s own imperial legacy and the gendered experience of war.

Woman Shooting (1992), an etching from Shimada’s Past Imperfect series, depicts a Japanese woman in occupied Manchuria wearing a white apron – a uniform of both domestic femininity and wartime mobilisation – while undergoing military training with a pistol. Elsewhere, in A House of Comfort (1993), the artist addresses the women from colonised and occupied territories forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military as so-called ‘comfort women’.

In ‘Kaihō’, visual culture registers rupture and continuity concurrently. ‘The war did not miraculously dismantle patriarchal and imperial legacies,’ says Ostende, ‘but it did foster aspirations for new democratic freedoms, particularly for women, including the right to vote, improved access to art education and the formation of the Women Artists Association in 1947.’

Women were afforded just enough liberty to create incisive and experimental art that, with irony, skewered the country's entrenched value systems, a critique the postwar order subsequently endorsed as proof of its own progress.

In her video and film work, Mako Idemitsu stages the post-war middle-class ideal of domesticated liberation as an interpellative trap, placing a television in the frame as both surveillant and moral enforcer. In Kiyoko's Situation (1989), for example, a painter's attempts to work are interrupted by the voices of her mother and mother-in-law on an in-frame monitor, the pair admonishing her for sacrificing family life for her art.

The exhibition also witnesses a fundamental rethinking of the representation of the body. 'A very important addition to the show confronting questions of intimacy, perversity and censorship is Tāri Itō’s performance piece Self Portrait (1996),' Ostende says. A reaction perhaps, against the highly eroticised staging of kinbaku rope bondage adopted by male artists like Nobuyoshi Araki, whose photographs render the bound woman immobile and, in effect, a sexual object. 'Itō, wearing latex as a second skin, uses air pipes to inflate parts of her body while narrating her own life story; eventually arriving at her lesbian identity.'

The language of abstraction provided ample breathing space for women to negotiate greater visibility within a male-dominated art world and revealed itself to be a mode capable of translating the fervent indeterminacy of industrial expansion that accompanied feminist discourse in Japan.

Alongside the likes of Tsuruko Yamazaki and Atsuko Tanaka, Yuko Nasaka was one of the few female figures associated with Gutai, an artist’s group directed against a perceived static attachment to tradition in Japanese visual culture. Nasaka’s concentric circles in relief were achieved through restrained, repetitive movement on a potter's wheel, the tool's rotation incised into plaster surfaces. The resulting works explore the possibilities of mechanical process but also feel remarkably cosmic, fulfilling the Gutai movement's open-ended engagement with form and matter.

In the latter half of the 20th century, abstraction registered more than rapid industrialisation and consumerist ideologies. Alongside it, Ostende adds, 'ran an expression of mobility and displacement', that fostered a plurilingual language of post-modernism. Despite remaining largely absent from dominant art historical narratives, as ‘Kaihō’ highlights, Japanese women were active participants in a transnational avant-garde, moving between Tokyo, New York, Europe and Brazil.

Fluxus, a particular kind of anti-art, promoting sensate and participatory models of engagement, offers one of the clearest examples. Recognisable proponents include Yoko Ono and, though she never aligned herself directly with the movement, the late Yayoi Kusama. Just as vital, however, were figures such as Mieko Shiomi, with her action poems, or Takako Saito, whose sensory chess games invited players to engage through touch, sound and smell. 'Being attached to transnational art movements allowed Japanese women to travel and circulate amongst different art scenes, which hadn’t really happened before,' says Ostende. 'They were truly part of a wider emancipatory feminist project.'

‘Kaihō: Japanese Women Artists after 1945’ is on view at Mudam, Luxembourg until 14 February 2027