Tetsumi Kudo

22 September - 21 November 2015

London

‘In Kudo’s sculptures and assemblages [...] there was a prevailing obsession with the theme of impotence linked to nuclear attack, a penchant for grotesque renderings of the body, cut into pieces or dissolving into puddles of goo, and a science-fictional dystopian picturing of the body as part machine... Kudo’s works looked less like sculpture than like movie props from lurid science fiction films [...] I admired them greatly.’

– Mike Kelley, ‘Cultivation by Radioactivity’ Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis, Walker Art Center, 2008

This Autumn, Hauser & Wirth London will host an exhibition of works by Tetsumi Kudo (1935 – 1990) mounted in conjunction with Andrea Rosen Gallery. The installation was conceived with Olivier Renaud Clément. The exhibition presents a selection of work dating from the first ten years that Kudo spent in Paris (1963 – 1972). The seminal, room-size installation ‘Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule’ (1968) forms the exhibition’s focal point and is shown alongside examples from his cube and dome series. Developed in the context of post-war Japan and France, Kudo’s practice, which encompasses sculpture, installation and performance-based work, is dominated by a sense of disillusionment with the modern world – its blind faith in progress, technological advancement, and humanist ideals. His oeuvre transcends formal categorisation yet his work was consistently universal in its language.

A key figure of Tokyo’s Anti-Art Movement in the late 1950s, Kudo’s performative paintings and installations marked the beginning of his preoccupation with the impact of nuclear catastrophe and the excess of consumer society associated with the post-war economic boom. Relocating to Paris in 1962, Kudo gained recognition for his Happenings, but this exposure to the European intellectual scene also intensified his aversion to the modern agenda. This manifested in the biomorphic sculptures and assemblages that Kudo produced from 1963, in which he sought to expose the limitations of the modernist and humanist values that defined the post-war era.

In his cube series, small boxes contain decaying cocoons and shells revealing half-living forms – often replica limbs, detached phalli or papier-mâché organs – that merge with man-made items. These sculptures were intended as a comment on the individualistic outlook and eager adoption of mass-production which he found to be prevalent in Europe. The mutations are unnatural and impotent – a product of a post-apocalyptic world in which the synthentic triumphs over nature. The cube exteriors are painted as die, a nod to the idea that it is the random forces beyond our control that dictate life, rather than individual agency as western philosophy teaches. ‘Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule’ is a die enlarged to over 3.5 square metres, with a small circular door allowing the viewer to climb into the dark interior lit with UV light. The elements within fluoresce in black light: molten cotton skin, penises and silhouettes of body parts litter the floor beneath giant artificial flower stems and a lurid green sign reads ‘for nostalgic purpose’.

Kudo’s dome works appear as futuristic terrariums: perspex spheres fed by circuit boards or batteries house artificial plant life, soil, and radioactive detritus. His use of acrid greens and yellows suggest a highly polluted environment. What is being cultivated in these mini eco-systems is a grotesque fusion of the biological and mechanical. That it is decomposing is illustrative of Kudo’s feeling that with the pollution of nature comes the decomposition of humanity.

Whilst Kudo’s presence in North America and Europe was marginal for many years, his influence on subsequent generations of artists has been profound and far-reaching. The simultaneously political, yet highly aesthetic, characteristic of his sculptural work is at the centre of the contemporary oeuvre. Allan Kaprow included photographs of Kudo’s performances in his 1965 compendium ‘Assemblages, Environments & Happenings’, images that would go on to inform Mike Kelley’s practice. Paul McCarthy also cited Kudo as a significant influence in his autobiography ‘Low Life Slow Life’ (2010).

About the Artist
Tetsumi Kudo was born in 1935 in Osaka, Japan, and spent a large portion of his youth in the town of Okayama, neighbour of Hiroshima. He graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 1958. In 1957, he began exhibiting his work at the Salon of Independents, Yomiuri and had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Blanche, Tokyo. He was awarded the Grand Prize and a travel grant to Paris through his participation in the 1962 Second International Young Artists Exhibition in Tokyo. He subsequently spent 25 years in Paris from 1962 to 1987 before returning to Japan. He died in Tokyo in 1990. Notable solo exhibitions include ‘Your Portrait: A Tetsumi Kudo Retrospective’ at The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2013) which toured to The National Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (2014) and Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan (2014); ‘Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis,’ Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN, (2008); ‘Tetsumi Kudo – La montagne que nous cherchons est dans la serre [The Mountain We Are Looking for Is in the Greenhouse],’ La Maison Rouge, Paris, France (2007); ‘Tetsumi Kudo – Contestation/Création,’ The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (1994); ‘Tetsumi Kudo, 1935 – 1990,’ The Van Reekum Museum, Apeldoorn and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1991). His works have also been included in landmark group exhibitions, ‘Japon des avant-gardes 1910 – 1970,’ at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (1986); ‘Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky,’ at Guggenheim Museum, New York NY (1994) and ‘Out of Action: Between Performance and the Object, 1949 – 1979,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA (1998). Kudo’s work is held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Chiba City Art Museum, Kurashi City Art Museum, Aomori Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal, MoMA Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art Center, amongst others.

Installation views

About the Artist

Tetsumi Kudo

In a wide-ranging practice spanning four decades, Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935 –1990) explored the human experience, interrogating the proliferation of mass consumption and the rise of technology. His oeuvre addresses themes of colonialism, racism, social cohesion, and environmental degradation through biomorphic sculptures and assemblages incorporating found materials.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kudo was a key player in the artistic avant-garde, critiquing consumerism and political conformity in Japan, and in the Nouveau Realisme movement in France. Working to subvert the separation between art and lived experience, Kudo’s influence can be found in the works of artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Isa Genzken, and David Altmejd.

Born in Osaka, Japan in 1935 to parents who were painters and educators, Kudo attended Tokyo National University of Fine Arts from 1954 – 1958. His worldview was shaped from an early age by the destruction of the Second World War as well as a scepticism towards traditional Japanese society that characterized much post-war political debate. Maintaining a contrary attitude towards traditional pedagogy, he supplemented his education by reading pamphlets on astrophysics, set theory, and quantum mechanics and organizing shows with fellow students.

Kudo remained in Tokyo until 1962. During this time he explored forms of expression ranging from gestural abstraction to sculptures incorporating objects such as scrub brushes, woven bamboo, colored yarn and tree limbs. He exhibited regularly in the annual Yomiuri Independant, the most significant venue for contemporary art in Japan. Kudo also held six solo exhibitions often accompanied by happening-like events, activities noted by Allan Kaprow in his seminal book, ‘Assemblages, Environments and Happenings’ (1966).

In 1962, Kudo was awarded the grand prize in the 2nd International Young Artist Pan-Pacific Exhibition. With the prize money of $1,500, earmarked for study in Paris, he and his wife moved to the French capital which became their residence for the remainder of his life. In France Kudo created series of works incorporating store-bought items such plastic dolls and kitchenware, small pet cages in which body parts fuse with transistors and circuit boards, and terrariums and hothouses in which plastic plants grow among vacuum tubes and slug like phalluses. These reflect his belief that ethical values had become as exchangeable as consumer goods and that technology, nature and humanity had come to influence each other in a closed circuit he dubbed ‘New Ecology.’

Kudo began traveling to Japan regularly in the 1980s and taught at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts until his death in 1990. Despite living in Europe for most of his life, Kudo’s art took on a transcultural and cosmopolitan worldview, with work that draws both on Japanese tradition and Western Modernism. His satirical, critical, and often matter of fact artistic practice has become a model for younger artists in an age of globalization and cultural transformation.

Kudo exhibited extensively in France, Holland, Germany and Italy, often inaugurating his shows with happenings attended by figures such as Marcel Duchamp and the venerable gallerist Ileana Sonnabend. In 1964 Dutch curator Wim Beeren included Kudo in ‘Nieuwe Realisten,’ or New Realists, a global survey of contemporary figuration and realism at the Gemeente Museum in The Hague. Major surveys of his work were presented at the Kunstverien, Dusseldorf in 1970 and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1972. Since his death, Kudo has been the subject of retrospectives at the National Museum of Art Osaka (1994-1995 and 2013-2014) both of which exhibitions toured in Japan; La Maison Rouge, Paris, 2007; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA, 2008; the Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 2016; and The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2020. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art and The Centre Pompidou.

Tetsumi Kudo’s works can be found in major collections such as Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; M+, Hong Kong; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; the Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN, among others.