Tetsumi Kudo was part of a generation of Japanese artists that was highly skeptical of traditional society in the wake of the events of World War II. An essential figure in the development of “Anti-Art” in 1950s Tokyo, Kudo regularly participated in the annual Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition – then Japan’s most significant venue for contemporary art –, showing work that sharply critiqued the rampant consumerism and political orthodoxy of Japan’s postwar recovery. After moving to Paris in 1962, Kudo began creating works guided by his feeling that, in a “New Ecology” where human, nature, and technology had become intertwined, ethical values were as exchangeable as commodity goods. This idea is evident in Your Portrait (1966), where a human eye is affixed to the interior of a pegboard box. Cultivation (1972) presents a garden of cactuses wryly imprisoned in a DayGlo-pink cage. Kudo often employed fluorescence to create an uncannily high-tech aura, as in the luminous Flowers (1967–1968) or the acidic tones of the phallic apparatus depicted in Pollution-cultivation- nouvelle écologie (1971). His postnatural visions capture the ambiguous detachment of a world reshaped by human desire.
Ian Wallace
