Saburo Murakami

Saburo Murakami (村上 三郎) was a Japanese visual and performance artist.

He was a member of the Gutai Art Association and is best known for his paper-breaking performances (kami-yaburi) in which he burst through kraft paper stretched on large wooden frames.

Paper-breaking is a canonical work in the history of Japanese post-war art and for the history of performance art.

Murakami’s work includes paintings, three-dimensional objects and installation as well as performance, and is characterized by a highly conceptual approach that transcends dualistic thinking and materializes in playful interactive forms and often thematizes time, chance and Intuition.

Saburo Murakami was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1925, as the third son of an English teacher at Kwansei Gakuin Junior High School.

He entered Kwansei Gakuin University in 1943, joined the university’s painting club Gengetsu-kai and began studying oil painting under Hiroshi Kanbara.

After World War II, he resumed his studies, graduating from Kwansei Gakuin in 1948.

In 1949, Murakami participated in the exhibitions of the art association Shinseisakuha kyōkai and began to study under painter Tsugurō Itō.

In 1950, Murakami began working as an art teacher at an elementary school.

He continued to teach art in elementary, middle and high schools, universities and kindergartens throughout his life.

In the early 1950s, he participated in several group exhibitions, such as the exhibitions of the Shinseisaku Kyōkai (between 1949 and 1954) and the Ashiya City Exhibitions (from 1952 until his death).

In 1950, he married Makiko Yamaguchi.

In the mid-1950s, he began to experiment with methods of applying paint, such as throwing a ball, which he had dipped into color, onto sheets of paper.

Murakami's discovery of tearing paper and other surfaces as a method of artistic production marked a turning point in his approach to painting and provided the basis for his later performance works.

In 1951 he enrolled in aesthetics at Kwansei Gakuin’s graduate school.

Their son Tomohiko Murakami, born in 1951, is a critic and researcher of manga and pop culture and has been a professor at Kobe Shoin Women’s University.

Murakami recounted that his paper-breaking was inspired by his toddler son, who in a tantrum burst through the fusuma paper space divider at their home.

In 1952 Murakami formed the Zero-kai (Zero Group) with Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, and Akira Kanayama, all fellows from the Shinseisaku Kyōkai.

In 1953, he held his first two-person exhibitions with Yasuo Nakagawa and Kazuo Shiraga.

Around 1953, Murakami gave up figurative painting and began making abstract paintings with surfaces that were structured in impastoed segments of oil paint.

In spring 1955, the Zero-kai members joined the Gutai Art Association, led by Jiro Yoshihara.

During his membership in Gutai from 1955 until 1972, Murakami presented his works mainly within Gutai projects, including the Outdoor Art Exhibitions at Ashiya Park in 1955 and 1956, the Gutai Art Exhibitions, the Gutai Art on the Stage shows in 1957 and 1958, the International Sky Festival in 1960, and Gutai’s participation in Expo ’70.

For the First Gutai Art Exhibition at Ohara Hall in Tokyo in 1955, Murakami stretched paper onto wooden frames, burst through the paper, and put the remaining ripped paper on display.

The first version Muttsu no ana (6 Holes) from 1955 posed the question of what constitutes the actual artwork – the object, the performance or the photography.

Murakami continued to perform the act of paper-breaking (kami-yaburi) throughout his entire life, varying in the number and quality of paper screens as well as in the structure.

For the Gutai group’s experimental projects like the Outdoor Art Exhibitions of 1955 and 1956, the Gutai Art Exhibitions between 1955 and 1971, and the Gutai Art on the Stage shows of 1957 and 1958, Murakami contributed interactive three-dimensional conceptual objects and performances of tearing paper.

Examples include Hako (Box) (1956), a wooden box with a ticking and ringing clock inside, Kūki (Air) (1956), a box made of plexiglass that contained nothing but air, and Arayuru fūkei (All Landscapes) (1957), a simple wooden frame hanging from the branches of a tree.

In 1957, Murakami created a number of paintings applying nikawa, an animal glue used in Nihonga painting, to the canvas, with the effect that the surface gradually peels off with time.

In 1960, Murakami was appointed the Japanese representative at the International Centre of Aesthetic Research Committee in Turin.

Murakami’s first solo exhibition took place at the Gutai Pinacotheca in 1963.

Murakami was also a fixture in the group’s international collaborations with French art critic Michel Tapié, art dealers Rodolphe Stadler in Paris and Martha Jackson in New York, and with the artist groups ZERO and Nul in Germany and the Netherlands.

In 1966, on behalf of Gutai, Murakami travelled to the Netherlands to facilitate the group’s participation in exhibitions with the Dutch and German artists groups Nul and ZERO.

Murakami remained a Gutai member until 1972.

Erudite in literature, aesthetics and philosophy, he was considered the “philosopher” among the Gutai members.[6]

Beginning in 1972, Murakami’s work increasingly included performance and interaction with the visitors of his exhibitions in galleries in Osaka and Kobe.

Around 1975, Murakami became involved in the artist collaborative Artist Union (AU) formed by fellow Gutai artist Shōzō Shimamoto and organized exhibitions, symposiums and mail art projects.

He continued to exhibit new works in group exhibitions such as the Ashiya City Exhibitions, but he also participated in an increasing number of exhibitions worldwide featuring Gutai.

In 1990 he became a full professor of Kobe Shoin Women’s Junior College, where he had taught art since 1950.

Murakami died in 1996 of a cerebral contusion.

At that time, he was preparing his first retrospective at the Ashiya City Museum of Art & History.