Born in Osaka in 1935. While still a student at Tokyo University of the Arts, he exhibited his works at the Yomiuri Independents Exhibition, a stronghold of postwar avant-garde art, and became a representative of the “anti-art” generation along with artists such as Ushio Shinohara and Shusaku Arakawa. In 1962, he moved to France after winning the grand prize at the International Young Artists Exhibition. For the next 20 years, he was based in Paris and made Europe his base of operations.

Kudo showed interest in issues other than art, such as biology and pollution, which are fundamental to human existence, and developed a unique world of work that combines a critical view of civilization with scientific thought. In recent years, there has been an accelerating international movement to reevaluate and reflect on Kudo’s work, and there is growing momentum for reevaluation.

Your Portrait was one of Tetsumi Kudo’s favorite titles. This work expresses the state of human survival in contemporary society, where people are covered with familiar materials such as receipts and confined to the closed space of a box. In other words, the “you” here refers to us, the viewers of the work, bound by preconceived values and promises, as well as to Kudo, the first viewer of the work.