Born in Osaka in 1938. After working as an assistant to photographers Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe, he became independent in 1964. He continued to publish his work in photography magazines and other media, and in 1967 won the Newcomer’s Award of the Japan Photo Critics Association for “Nippon Gekijou.” From 1968 to 1970, he participated in the photography coterie magazine “Provoke,” and his style of high-contrast and coarse-grained images was described as “Are, Bure, Boke” and he shocked the photography world with the precision of his depictions and the skill of his framing, which were not bound by conventional wisdom. His work has received international acclaim, including solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, and he continues to actively pursue his work, holding solo exhibitions around the world.

This shot was taken in 1978. Moriyama’s health was not good during this time, and he took fewer photographs, to the point where even the act of taking photographs seemed pointless to him. Seeking a breakthrough from such a stagnant situation, he decided to go to Hokkaido, a place he had longed to visit since his boyhood. Moriyama rented an apartment in Sapporo and stayed there for about three months, avoiding meeting with friends and acquaintances and spending his days shooting only by himself. However, this stay did not produce the expected results, and he returned to Tokyo with a sense of frustration. The horse standing in the photo is somewhat lyrical and emotional due to the nature of its motif, but at the same time it also exudes a sense of anxiety and gloom, strongly stimulating our emotions. In this way, it can be said that this work captures the emotional turmoil that Moriyama was going through at the time.

Born in Tokyo in 1920. He has left a significant mark as a pioneer of modern copperplate etching in Japan. While a student at Keio University’s Normal School, he learned copperplate etching techniques at the Etching Institute. In 1936, he entered the Oil Painting Department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and while working on oil paintings, tried his hand at copperplate etching in a temporary printmaking class. While continuing to mature his skills through participation in the “Ichimokukai” organized by Koshiro Onchi, he also developed the emotional aspect of the subjects of his works through his familiarity with European literature such as Baudelaire. While pursuing copperplate etching throughout his life, Komai also interacted with poets and musicians, and attempted cross-disciplinary expression with literature and music through his activities in the general art group “Jikken Kobo” (Experimental Workshop) and the publication of poetry and art books.

In Vision Fugitive, influenced by the pointillism of the Western-style painter Shikanosuke Oka, he used sandpaper to further dot the plate, a technique that produces a pale-toned surface like an aquatint. Komai was the first Japanese artist to win awards at the First Sao Paulo Biennial and the Second Lugano Black and White International Print Biennial for this work, which catapulted him into the national and international limelight.

Born in Nagano Prefecture in 1947. Attempting to reconstruct sculpture that had been dismantled in the currents of post-minimalism and mono-ha, he has consistently pursued the principles of sculpture and its structure that lead to the perception of human existence since the 1970s, and has continued to present its essence and potential through practice by creating works of art. After showing a series of conceptual works that attempted to redefine the concept of sculpture, he expanded his experimentation into the Woods series (1984), the From Borders series (1994), and the Minimal Baroque series around 2000, focusing on wood sculptures made with a chainsaw. Since participating in the Venice Biennale in 1988, he has expanded his presentation to international exhibitions and is highly regarded as a leading figure in contemporary Japanese sculpture.

In Twenty-Eight Deaths II, a tense expression is created by applying acrylic paint mixed with ash from burning wood shavings to the multilayered form of countless folds carved by a chainsaw. From this very expression, we can see the structure of a world where life and death are next to each other and sometimes reversed, as Toya says that birth is also “death” from some other state. By carving and engraving the material, Toya gouges out something inherent in the material and reveals what might be called the primordial and fundamental nature of humans and nature.

Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1950. While influenced by Minimalism and the Mono-ha movement, which radically questioned the principles of art from the 1960s to the 1970s, he maintained a critical attitude toward these ideas and set out to go beyond their horizons, producing works that use fired wood, water, earth, metal, and other materials, with “circularity” and “hollowness” at the core of their forms. In the 1980s, he exhibited at Documenta and the Venice Biennale, and toured in Scandinavia and the U.K. He is internationally acclaimed as one of Japan’s leading sculptors.

In Endo’s works, which aim to restore narrative in art, motifs such as boats, barrels, and coffins evoke ancient cultures and mythical tales, while primitive elements such as water and fire awaken in us the sense of life and death that lies at the root of human life. The overwhelming materiality and size of the work directly affects our physical senses, leading the viewer to a higher dimension of awe and ecstasy, and to a sense of life and death as one.

The surface of EPITAPH’s material is scorched black by fire, and the cavity inside is filled with water. The structural element of these works appear before our eyes as extremely stable materials that cannot be reduced any further, evoking a sense of connection to the earth through the material. Endo’s works attempt to draw us into the invisible structure of the world.

Born in Hokkaido Prefecture in 1934. Graduated from Nihon University College of Art, Department of Photography. After working at Nippon Design Center and Kawade Shobo Shinsha, he became independent in 1968. Since the early 1960s, he has published numerous photographic works, mainly in camera magazines. He is known as a photographer who pursued “privateness” and “play” through photographic expression.

Fukase established a unique position in the history of Japanese photography in the 1960s through his in-depth view of his own personal life, taking as his subjects his wife, family, his cat, and himself. In the spring of 1976, Fukase headed for Hokkaido, where the original landscape of his childhood remained, to escape his failing marriage. He visited Abashiri and Cape Erimo, and turned his lens on the numerous crows that inhabit the area. When he returned to Tokyo, he showed his photographs to Shoji Yamagishi, who recommended that he use “Ravens” as the title of his exhibition, since ravens were often seen in his photographs. In 1976, he held his first photo exhibition in 15 years, titled “Ravens.” This exhibition earned him the second Ina Nobuo Award the following year in 1977, and “Raven” became one of Fukase’s representative works. He continued to work energetically after that, releasing the “Private Scenes” series in which he himself was the subject. In June of 1992, Fukase fell down the stairs of a bar he frequented, suffering severe after-effects and spending the rest of his life receiving care in a special nursing home, never to take a picture again.

The Masahisa Fukase Archives was established by Tomo Kosuga in 2014, and since then, retrospective exhibitions have been held and photo books have been republished, revealing the full scope of his work, which had long been shrouded in mystery.

Born in Nagoya in 1932. After graduating from the Department of Japanese Painting at Tokyo National University of the Arts, he moved to the U.S. in 1958 and continued to work in New York. He is considered to be a leading figure in American minimalism in the 1960s and 1970s. In his early days, he produced works using Japanese painting pigments and washi paper, but after his first solo exhibition in New York in 1961 he shifted to two-dimensional works that combined monochromatic geometric shapes using acrylic paint. His works, which eliminate his subjectivity as an artist and aim for pure art and artistic experience, are still highly acclaimed internationally today.

The transition of Kuwayama’s artistic activities can be traced back to the early days of pigments used in Japanese painting, the period of acrylic paintings until around 1969, the oil paintings of the 1980s, and the period in which he presented space itself as a work of art. Among these, Untitled (TK 1196-ʼ62 Yellow, Red) dates from the period when he used acrylic paint, and the matte texture of the surface and composition clearly express the ascetic creative attitude that underpins all of Kuwayama’s work. Although red and yellow are used in this work, Kuwayama, who sought the existence of a neutral realm beyond emotions in his works, gradually began to use these colors less and less, which are associated with people’s emotions, and started to use metallic colors with aluminum more frequently.

Born in Miyazaki Prefecture in 1911. In 1936, he created a unique photogram that fixes his own image on photographic paper, calling it “photo-drawings,” and made his debut in the art world with the publication of a collection of his works entitled “Reason of Sleep”. In 1951, he formed the Democratic Artists Association, which rejected the authoritarianism of the art world, and attracted many young artists who admired him, such as Ay-O. While Ei-Q worked on oil paintings and photo-drawings, he was also a vigorous self-taught printmaker, leaving behind more than 300 copper prints and 150 lithographs.

Ei-Q used a variety of techniques and materials to develop his work from realism to cubism, surrealism, and abstraction, but after 1957, with the dissolution of the Democratic Artists Association, he was freed from the complications of group activities and daily life and focused on producing abstract paintings in oil. The abstract paintings initially consisted of circles and squares, which gradually became globular shapes, which then broke and exploded, and finally became moving dots. Then the dots became smaller and smaller until they covered the entire canvas. In light of this transition, Forest is a work that can be described as a localized version of Ei-Q’s oil paintings, and it shows Ei-Q’s unique and expansive spiritual world that resembles a universe.

Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1932. One of Japan’s leading conceptual artists. After graduating from then Aichi Prefectural Eighth Junior High School, he moved to Tokyo in 1951. He attracted attention with his “Bathroom” series of pencil drawings. In 1959, he moved to Mexico. Later, in 1965, he began his activities based in New York City. On January 4, 1966, he began the “Today” Series, in which he painted only the date of creation in white on a single-color canvas, which later became his signature work. Since 1966, he has never made an official appearance in a catalogue or other publications, never spoken about his work, and never given an interview; his true character has remained hidden.

The “Today” Series was created according to the following rules: the work must begin at midnight and be completed by the end of the day, the painting must be accompanied by a container containing information about the artist’s experiences that day (newspaper clippings, etc.), and the painting must be created according to the conventions of language, chronology, and punctuation used in the city. These were works that he continued to work on throughout his life. Despite the fact that the production was completed in one day, the production process for this series was quite detailed. The background color is applied in layers, and the date text is carefully formed by hand with an art knife. It is apparent that a great deal of time was spent on drying time for the paints and repeated revisions of the letters.

Born in Tokyo in 1936. In 1954, he entered Tokyo University of the Arts, where he studied under Ryohei Koiso. While working as an office worker after graduating from college, he formed Hi-Red Center with Genpei Akasegawa and Natsuyuki Nakanishi in 1963 and gave numerous performances. The activities of the Hi-Red Center came to a halt following the 1,000 yen note trial in which Genpei Akasegawa was indicted, and Takamatsu shifted his focus to individual activities. After creating his signature Shadow series, Takamatsu began to use natural materials such as wood and stone in his “Oneness” series around 1969. His Oneness of Brick is a part of that series.

In this work, Takamatsu processed a piece of natural material and then put it back together again, showing that although the state of the material may change, the existence of the object as a whole remains unchanged. Here, the issue of self-identity is addressed, a topic that has been a consistent theme since the early days of his work. Since then, Takamatsu has continued to conceptualize phenomena, things, and incidents he encounters in real life through a unique thought process, and has developed a wide variety of works in both method and style, posing fundamental questions.

Born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1937. He worked not only in avant-garde art, but also in various fields such as manga, writing, and photography. After entering Musashino Art University in 1955, he exhibited his work at the Yomiuri Independents Exhibition for the first time in 1958 and formed the Neo-Dada Organizers in 1960 with Masunobu Yoshimura and others. In 1963, together with Jiro Takamatsu and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, he formed Hi-Red Center and presented Model 1000-Yen Note and packaging works like his “Mixer Plans,” as well as performances such as the “Movement for the Promotion for a Clean and Organized Metropolitan Area.” In 1964, he was indicted on charges that his Model 1000-Yen Note piece was illegal, and the 1,000-Yen Note Trial began, in which he was ultimately convicted. Akasegawa began ordering printed 1,000-yen notes around 1963, and created objet d’art and packaging works using printed 1,000-yen notes, which he exhibited at the Yomiuri Independents Exhibition. Akasegawa’s first Model 1000-Yen Note was an invitation for his solo exhibition “On the Ambivalent Sea” held at Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery in February 1963.

This work, Model 1000-Yen Note III, was produced in May 1963, and was mistakenly printed in green on kraft paper, although it was requested to be printed in black. There were about 300 sheets of paper with the equivalent of three 1,000 yen bills printed on each, and they had not been cut. These were then used as-is to package the objects. Through this work, Akasegawa revealed the true nature of money, that its value is ambiguous and based on trust, and that paper money is nothing more than printed paper.