Hideko Fukushima

She graduated from Bunka Gakuin in 1943, and like many other artists of her generation, never underwent the formal western-style training in drawing and copying techniques that was commonly taught in art schools.

Instead, after meeting Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Shōzō Kitadai in July 1948 at the Summer Modern Art Seminar associated with the Avant-Garde Artists Club (日本アヴァンギャルド美術クラブ)—the three joined four other artists, including Miyoko Yanagida, to form the Shichiyōkai group in August 1948.

She debuted as an artist at the 1948 Shichiyōkai Exhibition, then participated in several art discussion groups including the Avant Garde Art Research Group, Yoru no Kai, and Century (Seiki no kai).

Within this milieu, there were few other female artists.

She participated in the third iteration of the Women’s Painting Association’s (Joryū Gaka Kyōkai) annual exhibition in 1949, alongside such painters as Yuki Katsura and Aiko Katatani.

Through her involvement in the Summer Modern Art Seminar, she met surrealist painter Nobuya Abe and became involved in Studio 50, an artistic research group that met in his studio.

The group self-published a mimeographed booklet, invited critics to speak, and read texts such as György Kepes’ Language of Vision together.

Aside from Fukushima and Abe, members included photographer Kiyoji Ōtsuji, artist Hideko Urushibara, and sculptor Aiko Miyawaki.

A series of photographs were taken in Abe’s studio during this time, directed by Abe, shot by Ōtsuji, and featuring Fukushima and other members of the group.

While Fukushima is clothed and generally facing more or less toward the camera in images titled "Portrait of an artist," one features another female member of the group nude with her face covered, and the overall series treats human figures in a manner that seems to prefigure Ōtsuji’s later object-centric surrealistic photographic style.

Fukushima was recognized as an avant-garde painter in the 1950s and early 1960s despite never having received formal training.

With the support of such figures as Nobuya Abe and Shūzō Takiguchi, she experimented with abstract, cubist, constructivist, and surrealist forms, charting a trajectory from experiments with figurative and facial forms to produce process-based paintings featuring the technique of “stamping” (捺す).

It was her works featuring pressed circles and lines that caught the eye of Michel Tapié, and which were featured in various European exhibitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Now her work is held in the collections of the Tate Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among others.

Fukushima grew up in a creative household, raised by a mother trained in Japanese dance and the tea ceremony.

A selection of these photographs was published in the October 1950 issue of the magazine Camera (Kamera) for a special feature on "The New Photographic Staging by Modern Artists," leaving open the question of who is the artist and blurring the lines between artist and subject.

Art historian Midori Yoshimoto argues that these photographs portray the tenuous position of Fukushima and other women artists in Japan at the time, "facing the persisting reality of a woman serving as an object for male artists," even when they are depicted as artists themselves.

It was through Abe that Fukushima met the internationally active surrealist critic and writer Shūzō Takiguchi, and through his support, she gained further prominence throughout the 1950s.

The group's activities were inspired by the European Dadaists, Surrealists, and Bauhaus—movements in which Takiguchi was most deeply invested, but responded to the specific circumstances of 1950s Tokyo, recovering as it was from the war defeat and destruction.

They further distinguished themselves through their commitment to a form of collaboration in which the distinction between individuals contributions would be masked to create a collective statement with each performance, exhibition, or presentation.

Tapié's attention launched Fukushima onto the international circuit, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, she participated in a number of shows in Europe.

In spite of Fukushima's prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, with critics and curators including Shūzō Takiguchi, Michel Tapié, and Atsushi Miyakawa discussing and promoting her work, by the 1980s she was rarely featured in the Japanese art press despite her continued gallery exhibitions.

In 1951, Fukushima became a founding member of the Tokyo-based 1950s avant-garde collective Jikken Kōbō, an experimental multi-disciplinary and technologically-inclined group for whom Takiguchi served as mentor.

Fukushima was one of three visual artists in Jikken Kōbō alongside Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Shōzō Kitadai, and her brother, musician and composer Kazuo Fukushima, was also a member, but she was the sole female participant in the collective.

A statement for their first public presentation in 1951 declared their intention “to combine the various art forms, reaching an organic combination that could not be realized within the combinations of a gallery exhibition, and to create a new style of art with social relevance closely related to everyday life.”

Fukushima's role in the group was typical of this collaborative ethos.

In fact, from Jikken Kōbō's first public presentation of the dance performance The Joy of Life, performed at Hibiya Public Hall in 1951 to accompany the first Picasso exhibition in Tokyo; Fukushima was creating bold geometric costume designs for the dancers to wear as they navigated between Shōzō Kitadai's mobile-like set pieces.

Although she exhibited her paintings as part of Jikken Kōbō’s 1952 exhibition at Takemiya Gallery and 1956 exhibition at Fūgetsu-dō, both in Tokyo, much of her work in the collective involved her experimenting with other forms of visual expression, including designing sets and costumes for the group’s stage performance works.

Other examples of her experiments in non-painting media included her collaboration with her brother Kazuo, creating the visuals for the 1953 autoslide projection Foam is Created (Minawa wa tsukurareru), and her designs for costumes and set pieces for the group’s 1955 performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 Pierrot Lunaire at Sankei International Conference Hall, Tokyo.

She was known as both a founding member of the Tokyo-based postwar avant-garde artist collective Jikken Kōbō and was recruited into Art Informel circles by the critic Michel Tapié during his 1957 trip to Japan.

As a member of Jikken Kōbō she participated in art exhibitions, designed visuals for slide shows and costumes and set pieces for dances, theatrical performances, and recitals.

She contributed to the postwar push that challenged both the boundaries between media and the nature of artistic collaboration, culminating in the intermedia experiments of Expo '70.

Just before Jikken Kōbō unofficially disbanded in 1957, Michel Tapié visited Japan for the first time.

During this five-week tour, he visited Tokyo and Osaka, meeting with Sōfū Teshigahara, the Gutai Art Association, Jikken Kōbō, and a number of other figures in the Japanese art scene.

It was in this context that he encountered Fukushima's paintings in a gallery, then took the opportunity to visit her studio, eventually encountering her again when he met with the whole Jikken Kōbō group.

In his reflections on the trip published as an article for the December 1957 issue of the art periodical Bijutsu techō, Tapié highlighted Fukushima as one of the most promising artists he met, writing:

However, upon her return to Japan after a year and four months in Europe in the early 1960s, there was a marked drop in interest in her work.

Nakajima notes that this may have been in part due to her getting married, but it also followed a similar pattern to other new Japanese women artists of the early postwar.

Although she continued exhibiting works through the 1980s and into the 1990s, including her later Blue Series, she never regained the spotlight in the Japanese art world.

Hideko Fukushima ( 福島秀子, Fukushima Hideko; 1927 – July 2, 1997), born Aiko Fukushima, was a Japanese avant-garde painter born in the Nogizaka neighborhood of Tokyo.