In the late 1960s, famed American artist Sol LeWitt staked a notorious claim on conceptual art, having articulated his definition for what would soon become a defining movement of the 20th century. While many American conceptualists earned their public image and credit in the years following, Japanese artist and theorist Jiro Takamatsu (1936-1998) was already paving a radical path in the rapidly changing landscape of postwar Tokyo.

Takamatsu opened up the possibility for conceptual art in Japan, very much apart from things that were happening in the 1960s. – Joe Baptista, partner, Pace Gallery

Pace, a leading international gallery, recently announced its representation of Takamatsu’s estate and has just opened the most significant solo exhibition of the artist’s works in the United States to date. In Takamatsu’s work, Pace partner Joe Baptista discovered parallels to the Western conceptual art movement that, upon examination, bring into question the limited geographical bounds of a canon-led narrative. “Takamatsu opened up the possibility for conceptual art in Japan, very much apart from things that were happening in the 1960s, but simultaneously,” he told STIR. “What’s so amazing about discovering an artist like Takamatsu, all these years later, is his point of view on conceptualism and the possibilities of art are very different. It's not form-fit to Sol Lewitt’s definition, per se—there's flexibility there.” 

“This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories,” Sol LeWitt remarked in his 1967 definition of conceptualism, but Takamatsu’s writings characterise him as a remarkable theorist. Over the course of his four-decade career, Takamatsu produced thousands of experiments in photography, sculpture, painting, drawing and performance. His prolific output was essential to his inquiry into theoretical concerns, such as human perception and quantum mechanics. Along with thousands of works on paper, including preparatory sketches and “final drawings”, Takamatsu’s development can also be traced in his abundant writings. Pace’s curatorial director Xin Wang told STIR that the title of the exhibition, The World Expands, was drawn from his collection of writing The World Expansion Project. “A lot of those quotes that float throughout [the exhibition] come from that collection of essays—not even essays, but thoughts—strings of thoughts that he started putting down in 1963. They are full of philosophical and existential reflections. These ‘strings of thought’ informed his art practice, which in turn informed his thinking—making for a continuous expansion on topics between mind and material across distinct series.”

Takamatsu graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1958 and shortly thereafter began working day jobs in animation and industrial design. Yet Takamatsu soon began his Point (1961-1964) and String (1962-1998) series in conjunction with his theories on space and entity. Referring to work from the String series, Baptista explained: “He used string in a number of different ways to create points of connection that relate to fixed and unfixed, seen and unseen. But quite curiously, in some of his writing, one could see that the string could as easily create an inverse of the connection as much as it could an explanation of physical space.”

From 1962-1964, Takamatsu was involved in the anonymous artist’s group Hi Red Center, which staged disruptions within the public urban space of Tokyo. While these events took the form of prankish activities—such as wearing white face paint or reading a smouldered newspaper on Tokyo’s busiest commuter line—the group is best known for their reproduction of a one-sided thousand yen note, for which one of the members was convicted on a criminal charge similar to counterfeiting. Of the group’s activities, Baptista described them as “a response to the changing landscape of industrialised life in Tokyo, as well as the recent experience of war, death and psychological trauma.” He clarified that Hi Red Center’s perspective was more discursive than critical and a means of creating a condition of reflection within everyday life.

Wang told STIR that Takamatsu began his next series, Shadow, in 1964 and was inspired by the Hi Red Center’s interest in using intervention as a means to “shock people out of their everyday norms and basic perceptions.” The Shadow series and Perspective series are the focus of Takamatsu’s debut at Pace. “Shadow connects his prior practice to his later work as the perfect point between the Hi Red Center activities and the Perspective series. We have a cogent narrative about his early practice that then radiates throughout his later practice, all of these consistent threads and issues of inquiry that interested him—mainly emptiness and absence as a philosophical-existential condition,” Wang explained.

At first glance, the Shadow works on display at Pace seem to operate on visual trickery. In these paintings, figures and objects painted a shade of grey hardly darker than the white canvas do appear as if real shadows have been cast on their surfaces, while Takamatsu’s play with scale, focus and opacity mimic the distance of subjects with naturalistic precision. In his 1967 painting Shadow of Brush No. 178, the artist’s incorporation of a three-dimensional hook fools one into thinking at least one of the two shadows it casts are real, until one realises that both include a nonexistent brush.

The theoretical underpinnings of both series emerge from Takamatsu’s writings in The World Expansion Project. From early in his career, the artist was interested in absence: the absence of the artist from the work and later, the absence of a subject within the work. Looking for what he described as a “device to generate absence”, he found the shadow. For Takamatsu, leaving only the trace of an object—its shadow—was a way to gesture towards its removal. In some of the Shadow works, one might feel compelled to turn around and locate the source of a figure’s shadow, only to find that there’s no one standing behind them. Even so, Takamatsu often increased the scale of shadows to an unrealistic degree so as to heighten the disconnect with what he described as “the actual”. He expanded on his skepticism of true representation in art with the Perspective series by exploring ways to intervene with a viewer’s ability to grasp and process images, such as applying linear perspective to three-dimensional space.

“I believe in Takamatsu's invention with these works as a way to connect us into pictorial reality with a new adapter plug,” Baptisa told STIR. When explaining the curatorial angle of the exhibition, he said: “We could have, of course, included more series into this, but I think focusing on too many would leave potentially the audience flat on feeling for the diversity of each of them, the expansiveness and the rigour with which he pursued these concepts.”

Baptista shared with STIR that Pace intends to focus on the artist’s later series in subsequent exhibitions. Both Wang and Baptista believe in this landmark exhibition as a site of deeper discovery into the narratives surrounding global conceptual art. Wang told STIR, “I'm really excited to have this exhibition as a locus for revisiting this really productive and chaotic postwar moment in Japan that is so foundational for many of the avant garde experiments that came after. And of course, this is not postwar Tokyo, but I think there's a similar existential angstiness, but also excitement, that connects us to that moment.”