Opening on 11 January 2025, GUTAI: Beyond the Canvas marks Whitestone Gallery Singapore’s first major exhibition on “Gutai,” an influential avant-garde art collective from twentieth-century Japan. With 50 pieces from the gallery’s extensive Gutai collection, including one by the movement’s founder Jiro Yoshihara, the show introduces Singaporean audiences to a powerful Asian force in global modern art.
Whitestone Gallery and Gutai
A pioneering player in Japan’s postwar artistic renaissance, Whitestone Gallery was first established in Tokyo in 1967. From the start, the gallery set out to introduce Japanese artistic talents to the world and shake up the conventions of the Japanese art market. Over the decades, Whitestone opened outposts in Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Taipei, bringing its roster of Japanese and international artists to new regional audiences.
In 2023, Whitestone Gallery made Singapore its first Southeast Asian location, while simultaneously opening its second branch of the New Art Museum, a private museum first established in 2012 in Karuizawa, Japan. One of the New Art Museum’s primary functions is to tell the story of Gutai, which has long lain at the heart of the Whitestone collection and curatorial efforts.
“As the first radical post-war artistic group in Japan,” Gallery Manager Priscilla Quek explains, “Gutai embodies creativity, innovation, and an unrestrained spirit. Showcasing this movement in Singapore is not only a tribute to its legacy but also a statement of our commitment to fostering artistic evolution, passion, and groundbreaking creativity in our new home. Through this exhibition, we aim to establish meaningful roots in Singapore’s vibrant art scene.”
What is Gutai?
While Beyond the Canvas includes works by both first- and second-generation Gutai artists, it focuses especially on four members from its second generation: Shuji Mukai, Tsuyoshi Maekawa, and Takesada Matsutani (known collectively as “3M”), and Yuko Nasaka, one of the group’s few female luminaries.
But before we look at these individual artists, we should perhaps first understand the movement’s origins, key ideas, and aims.
In 1954, the Gutai Art Association (or Gutai Bijutsu Dantai) was founded in Ashiya, a town near Osaka. This was a particularly unstable time for Japan, still reeling from its defeat in the Second World War and subsequent Allied Occupation, and navigating the rocky transition from totalitarianism to democracy. On all fronts — economic, industrial, political, and social — it was a period of rapid growth and change.
But, as is often the case with tumultuous times, this also meant conditions were ripe for something new to arise. And this “something” took the form of Jiro Yoshihara (b. 1905) and his contemporaries, arriving in truly explosive fashion on the Japanese art scene.
While Gutai (translated variously as “real,” “material,” or “concrete”) was in some respects a fairly loose and freewheeling movement, with members pursuing their own idiosyncratic paths, a few key characteristics emerge: namely, emphases on matter, newness, and process. We find these in Yoshihara’s manifesto of 1956 (as translated by Reiko Tomii), a brief yet fiery document expressing profound dissatisfaction with conventional and particularly representational art, in which he felt that “the matter called paint … cloth, metals, earth, and marble … were made to fraudulently assume appearances other than their own.”
Yoshihara contrasts this “fraudulent” art with the unexpected beauty of things destroyed by time or nature. To him, these ruins are where “the innate beauty of matter,” defying “the mask of artificial embellishment,” can emerge.
Gutai, then, rests on a new relationship between “spirit” (the abstract ideas and desires of the human mind) and “matter” (the physical reality of paint, cloth, metals, and earth). Rather than subjugating his medium to his will, the Gutai artist listens to what it has to say; or, as art historian Kunio Motoe puts it, “Spirit and matter coexist and confront each other on equal terms.”
Making it new
Besides its reverence for the material (expressed through a plethora of mediums including painting, performance, and installation art), the Gutai movement also placed great emphasis on newness and originality. In keeping with the newfound sense of freedom and reinvention characterising postwar Japan, Yoshihara exhorted Gutai members to “make something that has never been” — to break away from the stale conventions of traditional representative art.
Simultaneously, the Gutai artists prioritised the artistic process over the finished product. This manifested in the unusual methods they used to create art: Shozo Shimamoto exploded paint in a cannon and tossed glass bottles filled with pigment onto canvas, while Kazuo Shiraga writhed in mud and painted using his feet. Though second-generation Gutai artists moved away from the first generation’s passionate emphasis on performance to more two-dimensional works, the primacy of innovation and process remained unchanged.
Shuji Mukai: Signs and wonders
Influenced by Shiraga as well as Akira Kanayama (who used a remote-controlled machine to paint), Shuji Mukai (b. 1939/40, Kobe) became the youngest Gutai member in 1961. We can recognise his work by its dizzying profusion of symbols — triangles, circles, and squiggles resembling ancient sigils or mathematical figures — in a characteristic palette of black, white, yellow, and gold.
One of the pieces featured in Beyond the Canvas is Work No. 1 (1994): a triangular board, divided into smaller squares, which are filled with Mukai’s enigmatic signs. Hardwired to interpret what we see, we search the work for meaning, but none is forthcoming. Without the comfort of explanation, we are left adrift to make of the piece what we will.
Tsuyoshi Maekawa: Textile textures
Tsuyoshi Maekawa (b. 1936, Osaka) first exhibited in a Gutai show in 1959, before becoming an official member in 1961. He is best known for his use of burlap and other textiles to create highly textural paintings that jut off the canvas into the third dimension.
Over the years, Maekawa experimented with a variety of methods, from shaping and cutting glue-soaked fabric to using a sewing machine. Initially drawn to the coarse texture of burlap, he later expanded to work with more delicate fabrics like cotton and hemp. During the 1990s and 2000s, long after the dissolution of the Gutai Art Association in 1972, he created works dominated by the vibrant primary colours of acrylic paint.
In GUTAI: Beyond the Canvas, Untitled 170333 (2012), a piece from this period, evinces this interest in brilliant colour, as well as the organic shapes and prominent textures that characterised Maekawa’s earlier work.
Takesada Matsutani: From glue to graphite
Takesada Matsusani’s (b. 1937, Osaka) journey to become a Gutai member was no easy one. Facing rejection from the exacting Yoshihara many times, he finally gained admission in 1963 after developing his trademark use of vinyl glue (what we might call white glue or Elmer’s glue today). Inspired in part by the circular shapes of cells as seen through a microscope, Matsusani would pour vinyl glue on canvases, using his own breath to form large bubbles which he could then cut or otherwise manipulate.
In 1966, Matsusani won a grant to study in France, where he learnt printmaking under the English artist Stanley William Hayter. From the late 1970s onwards, he also embarked upon a new phase of his work, using black graphite pencils to cover paper and other surfaces — often very large, even mural-sized — with countless dark strokes.
Still later, Matsusani would combine his vinyl glue and pencil techniques, and branch out from monochrome into colour. Characterised by a minimalist visual language, with great emphasis on the unique qualities of the materials used, his works offer the viewer spaces for peaceful contemplation.
Yuko Nasaka: Round and round
Described by Yoshihara himself as “bright and persistent, and somewhat extraordinary,” Yuko Nasaka (b. 1938, Kobe) was one of the few female members of Gutai (others included Kimiko Ohara, Atsuko Tanaka, and Tsuruko Yamazaki). Following a prize awarded for a work made of corrugated paper drilled with countless small holes, Nasaka officially joined the association in 1963.
Preceded by Mukai, Maekawa, and Matsusani, Nasaka held a 1964 solo exhibition at the Gutai Pinacotheca (a museum that served as the epicentre of the Gutai movement from 1962–70). In this show, which was attended by Western avant-garde icons including Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, she showcased the circular works that came to define her oeuvre.
After covering wooden panels in glue, plaster, and clay, Nasaka would place them on a turntable resembling a potter’s wheel, and, palette knife in hand, turn them to carve out concentric circles. In exhibition, the panels could be arranged almost floor to ceiling to create a monumental sense of scale.
Like Yoshihara’s circle paintings, Nasaka’s works communicate a sense of cosmic infinitude: start at one spot, use your eyes to trace the circle’s arc, and you soon find yourself at the start again. Yet, Nasaka also drew inspiration from the round measuring instruments made at her father’s factory, and finished each panel with a mist of car lacquer — a combination of the spiritual and material, the transcendent and the everyday, that in some ways marked the Gutai movement as whole.
Gutai legacies
At first, the Gutai movement, with its maverick disdain for tradition, received mixed reviews in Japan. However, in no small part due to the efforts of French critic Michel Tapié as well as the international circulation of its publication The Gutai Journal, it was soon recognised and exhibited in Western cities such as New York as early as the 1950s. Even after the association’s official dissolution in 1972 following Yoshihara’s death, Gutai artists continued to espouse its ideas and develop their individual practices, with several of the second-generation artists remaining active to this day.
Today, critics recognise Gutai as a highly influential art movement, whose forays into arenas such as performance and installation art even predate comparable moments in Western art. Though new scholarly writing, auction sales, and major exhibitions at global institutions such as the Guggenheim reflect renewed interest in Gutai, much of its history remains to be studied and understood, with exhibitions like GUTAI: Beyond the Canvas contributing to raise the movement’s profile in Asia and beyond.
On one level, the works of the Gutai movement — these sensuous collisions of spirit and matter — speak for themselves. As Shuji Mukai suggests in a 2015 interview, the “reality of Gutai” has to do with feeling and sensation over intellect or philosophy.
But, when we understand Gutai’s historical contexts — from its beginnings in the 1950s to its continued impacts on global contemporary art — we also grasp a valuable lesson: what experimentation, originality, and dogged pursuit of the ideas that most compel us can do. In some ways, we can view the works in GUTAI: Beyond the Canvas as the fruits of just such values. As Yoshihara writes in his manifesto, “Gutai places an utmost premium on daring advance into the unknown world.”
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GUTAI: Beyond the Canvas runs at Whitestone Gallery Singapore from 11 January to 2 March 2025. Visit whitestone-gallery.com to find out more.
Curious to learn more about Gutai? Read interviews with prominent Gutai artists here.
Header image: Tsuyoshi Maekawa, Untitled 110804 (2011), cotton cloth and acrylic on pane, 53.0 × 72.6 cm.
This article is produced in paid partnership with Whitestone Gallery Singapore. Thank you for supporting the institutions that support Plural.
