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Genpei Akasegawa
was a pseudonym of Japanese artist , born March 27, 1937 – October 26, 2014 in Yokohama. He used another pseudonym, , for literary works. A member of the influential artist groups Neo-Dada Organizers and Hi-Red Center, Akasegawa went on to maintain a multi-disciplinary practice throughout his career as an individual artist. He has had retrospective exhibitions at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Chiba City Museum, and Oita City Museum. His work is in the permanent collection at Museum of Modern Art in New York. Artist Nam June Paik has described Akasegawa as “one of those unexportable geniuses of Japan.” Biography Early life Akasegawa was born in 1937 in Yokohama, and moved to Ashiya, Ōita and Nagoya during his childhood because of his father's job. The artist Shūsaku Arakawa was a high school classmate in Nagoya. In the 1950s Akasegawa moved to Tokyo where he attended Musashino Art University in 1955 to study oil painting. In 1956 and 1957, Akasegawa s ...
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Yokohama
is the second-largest city in Japan by population and the most populous municipality of Japan. It is the capital city and the most populous city in Kanagawa Prefecture, with a 2020 population of 3.8 million. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu. Yokohama is also the major economic, cultural, and commercial hub of the Greater Tokyo Area along the Keihin Industrial Zone. Yokohama was one of the cities to open for trade with the West following the 1859 end of the policy of seclusion and has since been known as a cosmopolitan port city, after Kobe opened in 1853. Yokohama is the home of many Japan's firsts in the Meiji period, including the first foreign trading port and Chinatown (1859), European-style sport venues (1860s), English-language newspaper (1861), confectionery and beer manufacturing (1865), daily newspaper (1870), gas-powered street lamps (1870s), railway station (1872), and power plant (1882). Yokohama develop ...
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Masunobu Yoshimura
, was a Japanese visual and conceptual artist associated with the Neo-Dada movement. In 1960, he was the founder and leader of the short-lived but influential artistic collective Neo-Dada Organizers, which had as members several young artists who would later become well-known, including Genpei Akasegawa, Shūsaku Arakawa, and Ushio Shinohara. His "White House" atelier in Shinjuku, Tokyo served as the center of the group's activities. Early life and education Masunobu Yoshimura was born on May 22, 1932, in Ōita on the southern island of Kyushu, the 9th son of his parents, who ran a pharmacy. While still in high school, he became active in a local art circle, the "New Century Group" (''Shin Seiki Gun''), which was centered around the local Ōita art supplies store Kimuraya. Other members of this circle from the same area that Yoshimura met at this time included future Neo-Dada collaborators Genpei Akasegawa, Shō Kazakura, and Arata Isozaki. In 1951, Yoshimura failed the entr ...
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Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono ( ; ja, 小野 洋子, Ono Yōko, usually spelled in katakana ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1953 with her family. She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became well known in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles. The couple used their honeymoon as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War. She and Lennon remained married until he was murdered in front of the couple's apartment building, the Dakota, on 8 December 1980. Together they had one son, Sean, who later also became a musician. Ono began a career in popular music in 1969, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Lennon and producing a number of avant-garde music albums in the 1970s. She achieved commercial and critical acc ...
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Imperial Hotel, Tokyo
The is a hotel in Uchisaiwaicho, Chiyoda ward, Tokyo. It was created in the late 1880s at the request of the Japanese aristocracy to cater to the increasing number of Western visitors to Japan. The hotel site is located just south of the Imperial Palace grounds, next to the previous location of the Palace moat. The modern hotel overlooks the Palace, the Western-style Hibiya Park, and the Yurakucho and Ginza neighborhoods. Three main buildings have stood on the hotel site, each of which embodied the finest Western design of its era. Including annexes, there have been at least 10 structures that have been part of the Imperial Hotel, including two designed by Frank Lloyd Wright: *The original Imperial Hotel, designed by Yuzuru Watanabe (1890–1922) *Hotel Metropole in Tsukiji, purchased as an annex (1906–1910) *First Imperial Hotel annex (1906–1919) *A temporary annex, designed by Wright when the original hotel annex burnt (1920–1923) *New Imperial Hotel main bui ...
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Kanji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of '' hiragana'' and '' katakana''. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After World War II, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common com ...
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Jiro Takamatsu
was one of the most important postwar Japanese artists. Takamatsu used photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and performance to fundamentally investigate the philosophical and material conditions of art. Takamatsu's practice was dedicated to the critique of cognition and perception, through the rendering and variation of morphological devices, such as shadow, tautology, appropriation, perceptual and perspective distortion and representation. Takamatsu's conceptual work can be understood through his notions of the Zero Dimension, which renders an object or form to observe its fundamental geometrical components. Takamatsu isolated these smallest constituent elements, asserting that these elements produce reality, or existence. For Takamatsu the elementary particle represents “the ultimate of division” and also “emptiness itself,” like the a line within a painting—there appears to be nothing more beyond the line itself. Yet, Takamatsu's end goal was not to just prove the ...
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Shōchū
is a Japanese distilled beverage. It is typically distilled from rice, barley, sweet potatoes, buckwheat, or brown sugar, though it is sometimes produced from other ingredients such as chestnut, sesame seeds, potatoes, or even carrots. Typically shōchū contains 25% alcohol by volume, which is weaker than baijiu, whiskey or vodka but stronger than huangjiu, sake or wine. It is not uncommon for multiply distilled shōchū, which is more likely to be used in mixed drinks, to contain up to 35% alcohol by volume. Etymology The word is the Japanese rendition of the Chinese ''shaojiu'' (), meaning "burned liquor", which refers to the heating process during distillation. The Chinese way of writing ''shaojiu'' with the character 酒 is considered archaic and obsolete in modern Japanese, which uses the character 酎. Nevertheless, both characters mean "liquor". Culture Drinking ''Shōchū'' should not be confused with sake, a brewed rice wine. Its taste is usually far l ...
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Michiko Kanba
was a Japanese communist, University of Tokyo undergraduate, and a Zengakuren activist. She died in clashes between demonstrators and police at the South Gate of the National Diet Building in central Tokyo at the climax of the 1960 Anpo Protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty. She is buried in Tama Cemetery in Tokyo. Activism and writing Michiko Kanba was born in Tokyo. Her father was Toshio Kanba, a sociologist and professor at Chuo University. Kanba was raised in a middle-class Christian household, and entered University of Tokyo in 1957 and joined the Japan Communist Party on November of that year. After that, she became a leader in the New Left organization "The Bund" and participated in the massive Anpo Protests against the revisions of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan. Kanba was one of the 76 student activists who were arrested at a January 26, 1960 sit-in at Haneda Airport. She also participated in protests aroun ...
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Reiko Tomii
is a Japanese-born art historian and curator based in New York. Specializing in Japanese modern and conceptual art in its global context during the postwar period, Tomii is one of the art historians publishing in the English language on postwar Japanese art. Tomii helped organize the first North American retrospective on the work of Yayoi Kusama (1989), and collaborated closely with curator Alexandra Munroe to produce the seminal exhibition and book ''Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky'' (1994). In 2017, Tomii's book ''Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan'' was awarded the Robert Motherwell Book Award by the Dedalus Foundation. Tomii is also co-founder and co-director of the postwar Japanese art research collective PoNJA-GenKon (Post-1945 Japanese Art Discussion Group-Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai). Early life and education Reiko Tomii was born and raised in Osaka, Japan. Raised by two pharmacist parents who pushed her to study ...
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Ichirō Hariu
, was a Japanese art critic and literary critic, remembered as one of the "Big Three" art critics of postwar Japan (alongside Yoshiaki Tōno and Yūsuke Nakahara). Early life and education Ichirō Hariu was born on December 1, 1925, in the city of Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture. Hariu graduated from Tohoku University with a degree in literature in 1948, before going on to attend graduate school at Tokyo University. While in graduate school, he participated in the Yoru no Kai ("Nighttime Society") literary society alongside Tarō Okamoto, Kiyoteru Hanada, Kōbō Abe, and others. In 1953, Hariu followed the majority of other writers and artists in Japan in joining the Japan Communist Party, as a way of expiating his shame for having supported wartime Japanese militarism. Career As an art critic, Hariu initially supported art that adhered the Communist party's policies of promoting socialist revolution. However, over time he became increasingly opposed to JCP policies and supporte ...
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Natsuyuki Nakanishi
Natsuyuki Nakanishi (Kanji: 中西夏之, ''Nakanishi Natsuyuki'', b. July 14, 1935, Tokyo, d. October 23, 2016) was a Japanese visual and conceptual artist associated with the 1960s avant-garde art movement in Japan. His artworks ranged from Neo-Dadaist object-based works, happenings and performance art, to abstract painting. Nakanishi co-founded the groundbreaking artistic collective Hi-Red Center along with Jirо̄ Takamatsu and Genpei Akasegawa. Later in his career, Nakanishi would become known for painting practice featuring subdued palettes and idiosyncratic marks. He is also recognized for his pedagogical work, including his involvement with the experimental Bigakko school as well as professorship as Tokyo University of the Arts. Early life and career Nakanishi was born in Ōimachi, Shinagawa, Tokyo in 1935. In 1958, he graduated with a bachelor's degree from Tokyo University of the Arts, where he focused on oil painting. Jirō Takamatsu, who would become an importan ...
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Tomio Miki
Tomio is a masculine Japanese given name. Possible writings Tomio can be written using different combinations of kanji characters. Some examples: *富雄, "enrich, masculine" *富男, "enrich, man" *富夫, "enrich, husband" *冨雄, "enrich, masculine" *冨男, "enrich, man" *冨夫, "enrich, husband" *斗巳雄, "Big Dipper, sign of the snake (Chinese zodiac), masculine" The name can also be written in hiragana とみお or katakana トミオ. Notable people with the name * , Japanese film actor * , Japanese historian * , Japanese sprinter * , Japanese karateka * , Japanese photographer * , Japanese diver * , Japanese mathematician * , Japanese professor at Osaka University , abbreviated as , is a public research university located in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. It is one of Japan's former Imperial Universities and a Designated National University listed as a "Top Type" university in the Top Global University Project. ... * , Japanese educator * , American businessman *, Jap ...
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