Kazuo Shiraga performing "Challenging Mud" at the 1st Gutai Open Air Exhibition, Tokyo, 1955. From MoMus.

A sickly yellow background, so viciously assaulted by streaks of maroon, black, and brown that it nearly resembles a mutilated corpse. Bright red hues are splattered throughout like fresh blood, with deep purple stripes mimicking swollen veins. The longer you gaze at its horror, the larger the feeling of unease grows in your stomach. But this isn’t a crime scene, nor is it the set of a slasher film: it’s postwar abstractionist Kazuo Shiraga’s “Untitled 1958”. 

These grotesque, violent depictions are consistent throughout Shiraga’s work. He had an open obsession with war, bodily violence, and the visual effects of blood, so it’s not surprising that he spent the entirety of his artistic career experimenting with how to best portray a morbid reality. He became known for his large canvases depicting abstracted scenes of morbidity and destruction, eerie and uncomfortable to their cores and expressive to the most intense degree. 

Shiraga was born in Amagasaki, Japan in 1924. He studied Nihonga, or traditional Japanese painting, from a young age, and was drafted into the Imperial Japanese army at the age of 20. Following his discharge and the fall of the Empire of Japan, Shiraga returned to his hometown to found the Gutai Art Association alongside his artistic contemporaries. Gutai was created during turbulent times– Japan had just suffered horrific losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, gotten ripped to shreds by World War II, and been forced to create a new government from scratch. However, in this environment of postwar despair, neither Japan nor its people were the victims. Millions throughout East and Southeast Asia had suffered at the hands of the Imperial regime, and all of Japan- including Shiraga- had merely watched, complacent in their position as the conquerors. Thus, Shiraga’s art didn’t reflect mere sadistic fascination, it was a brutally honest response to the feelings of sorrow, loss, and imperialist shame shared by all of Japan. 

Shiraga loved his country, and drew much of his inspiration from traditional Japanese culture. He wanted to free the Japanese people from their emotional shackles, but how could he when the shame of violence and massive loss was so recently inflicted? Apparently, by embracing that shame.

In his art, Shiraga mixed feelings of tragic loss, absolute freedom, and unbridled violence into one singular feeling: concreteness, or gutai. He and other members of the Gutai collective sought to express war’s traumatic effect on both the victim and oppressor using only objective, physical reality. After all, it was abstracted, metaphysical concepts such as the “Fatherland”, “Divine Ruler”, and supposed Japanese superiority that had led to the anguish Japan was now experiencing. Instead, Gutai chose to place their trust only in what they could objectively experience: the human body and physical matter. They rejected the strict uniformity of fascism and communism, focusing on individual expression. Shiraga was the group’s largest proponent of this philosophy, writing a number of reflections centered around the concept of “innate sensibility” as it relates to physical expression.

Shiraga’s artwork was most notable for its use of “foot-painting”, a pretty self-explanatory original technique that he developed in the 50s. In summary, it’s a style in which artists paint with their feet. Despite his training in traditional Japanese painting, Shiraga voluntarily discarded artistic tools, which only functioned to “separate” the artist from their art. He preferred to use his bare body, regardless of the medium.

Unsurprisingly, many critics weren’t overwhelmingly fond of his unconventional style. In fact, when Shiraga’s work was first shown in America at the Martha Jackson Gallery– a gallery known for promoting the works of women and international artists–in 1958, it was instantly dismissed as a “knockoff” of western Abstract Expressionism. Renowned New York Times art critic Dore Ashton reduced Shiraga to an imitator devoted to copying “great” American artists such as Jackson Pollock; but Shiraga wasn’t an imitator, nor was he interested in recreating the work of American artists. 

Actually, it’s not quite correct to say that Ashton’s article “reduced Shiraga to an imitator”, as she never even mentions him by name. In fact, she makes more references to Jackson Pollock than she does to Gutai artists; totally expected, given her clear preference for Western art. In a patronizing tone, Ashton declares that while Gutai’s dramatic attitude is “truly revolutionary”, their art is “lifeless”, “insignificant”, and “rather dull”– and finally, to truly prove her narrow-minded perspective, she finishes by stating that their work contains “no philosophically based aesthetic, but rather a simple, often innocent, path-of-least-resistance attitude.” In sum, she maintains that while the Gutai collective’s efforts are admirable, their art is merely a boring attempt to capitalize off of Pollock’s legacy. 

Claiming that Gutai art is “innocent” is odd enough, but to say that it adheres to a “path of least resistance” is almost laughable. Shiraga in particular quite literally saw his artistic process as a battle– one of his most renowned pieces, Challenging Mud, is exactly that: a fight with the earth. A glance at any one of Shiraga’s works is enough to convince a viewer of his preference for struggle: each and every one of his canvases is a dynamic, practically living mass of blood and beauty. 

Throughout her review, Ashton heavily implies that the Gutai Group pursued unorthodox art styles purely for the sake of “electrifying” the public; basically, for shock factor. These artists, she states, were “hungry for change”, attempting to become revolutionaries by mimicking the art of celebrated Abstract Expressionists. Shiraga was hungry for change– change in his war-torn country and the attitudes of his people towards art. An impressive level of conceit is shown in Ashton’s adherence to the belief that Gutai artists were in pursuit of Western praise. 

This watering-down of Shiraga and his Japanese contemporaries’ powerful, distinctly Asian work is not only an incredibly shallow analysis, but is also elitist and even subtly racist. Without any consideration for the contexts of Shiraga’s work, Ashton simplified it into an attempted recreation of New York’s Abstract Expressionism. But Shiraga was not from New York, nor was he an Abstract Expressionist– so the idea of viewing his art through such a lens is, frankly, ridiculous. To truly understand Shiraga and his artwork, it is first necessary to understand who he is and where he comes from.

In his “On New Democracy”, Communist leader Mao Zedong wrote, “There is no construction without destruction, no flowing without damming and no motion without rest; the two are locked in a life-and-death struggle.” While Shiraga’s work certainly reflects the notion of construction and destruction bringing about one another, it doesn’t quite depict them as being in a “life-and-death struggle” – rather, he views them as intrinsically intertwined. In a 1955 interview, Shiraga stated that he wanted to paint “as though rushing through a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion.” In this scenario, construction and destruction are the same. To him, artistic violence is freedom: on his canvases, the bloody, flesh-evoking paints are completely unconfined, even breaching their dimensional borders at certain points. For both Shiraga and his Gutai contemporaries, this concrete “sameness” was exactly what war was: bloody, tragic, and chaotic, but always ending in radical change and freedom. 

In the worlds of art criticism and curation, Kazuo Shiraga is often quoted with a statement he made in a 1998 interview, a decade before his death: “My art needs not just beauty, but something horrible.” While usually used to highlight the unique, abstract grotesqueness of his work, an important aspect is overlooked with this usage: Shiraga was not rejecting conventional beauty, he was seeking to add to it an element of morbidity. Not for the sake of novelty, shock factor, or to “imitate” the moderness of Abstract Expressionism, but to represent what he believed the postwar world truly was: creation, destruction, chaos, imperfection, and absolute boundless beauty.