Liam Otero: "Chelsea Exhibition Reviews" featuring Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama

Run, don’t walk to Paula Cooper Gallery because Japanese art lovers are in for a special exhibition: a joint show on Atsuko Tanaka (1932 - 2005) and Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), two powerhouse female artists of Japan’s postwar generation. Furthermore, this exhibition is a reengagement with the artists who were each shown in earlier solo exhibitions at Paula Cooper: Yayoi Kusama: The 1950s and 1960s, Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Papers in 1996 and Atsuko Tanaka: Paintings and Drawings, 1980 - 2002 in 2004.

Now viewers have the opportunity to discover remarkable parallels between the Matsumoto-born Kusama and Osaka-native Tanaka. A careful selection of early, mid, and late-career paintings by the artists are used to guide one in ascertaining how Kusama and Tanaka—who never collaborated—each forged similar yet distinct abstract styles and accomplished careers.

Before even getting to the paintings, a wall of photographs by the entrance demonstrate how these artists were heavily preoccupied with performance: Tanaka’s Electric Dress (Denkifuku) in which she dons a heavily-layered costume of several hundred tube lights and light bulbs from 1956, and Kusama in an early iteration of her Infinity Mirror Room from the 1960s. The Tanaka images were especially revelatory as her Electric Dress predated the performative fashion of Yoko Ono and her Cut Piece demonstration (1964). Additionally, Tanaka was a member of the experimental Gutai Art Association while Kusama was a fixture of Fluxus and the Happenings in New York.

The main focus of the exhibition are the abstract paintings of Kusama and Tanaka - the former with her seas of dots and strokes, and the latter’s preoccupation with circles linked by an intricate system of lines. Kusama’s art is inextricably tied to her mental health struggles, hallucinations, and obsessiveness. Tanaka’s are bound up in an infatuation with technology, particularly that of electricity, which explains why her paintings recall an electrical grid system comprised of wires and bulbs. Subsequently, repetition is a key commonality—perhaps, the most important one—that is underscored between the artists’ stylistic and thematic predilections. 

Though Tanaka remained in Osaka and did not move abroad like Kusama, Paula Cooper cleverly showcased the international reach Tanaka exerted in the Art World comparable to her contemporary. Three small-scale watercolor paintings on rice paper are included as these works were gifts she created for the American artist Sam Francis (1923 - 1994), one of the central figures of the highly influential California modern art scene. 

Industrialization undergirded the visual and materialistic motivations behind Tanaka’s works, from her pictorial references to electricity to her adoption of glossy vinyl paint in the 1970s. Though one does not typically associate Kusama with industrialization, the all-over accretion of dots, strokes, and phalluses can be read in a similar light on contextual grounds. Kusama’s use of repetition in her works of the 1950s & 1960s coincided with the post-World War II economic boom that swept Japan and the United States—two countries that subsequently underwent rapid industrialization. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Kusama’s additive process of applying strokes or cut-outs can be thought of in terms of the consumer-driven, high-tech, commercial economies that arose in the East and the West, which is akin to Tanaka’s electrical references and switch to a commercially-based paint. 

I feel that this is the perfect example of an exhibition whose curatorial methodology matches that of a Venn Diagram in articulating the commonalities among two unique yet equally fascinating figures of Postwar Japanese art.