Early works Shiraga, who was painting and drawing landscapes and urban cityscapes in his 20s, picked up
Post-Impressionist and
Surrealist disfiguration in the late 1940s, inspired by European Romanticist literature and Japanese folk tales. In 1952 he further shifted to abstraction by meticulously scraping layers of paint over the whole on the canvas with palette knives and spatulas. The neatly aligned segments of blurred and blended paint produced the effect of shimmering reflections on deformed mirrors and attested to Shiraga’s interest in making visible the process of painting. Around 1954, Shiraga gave up using tools and used his hands, fingers, and fingernails to smear the oil paint (predominantly monotone
crimson lake red) in linear movements all over the canvasses.
Foot paintings in 2023 Shiraga created his first foot paintings in 1954. His method involved stepping into the picture to smear the oil paint on a large painting support spread horizontally on the floor, with the intent of avoiding compositional control, structure, and color. He soon hung a rope from the ceiling of his studio, which he could hold on to, so that he could glide over the painting surface without falling. In the beginning, Shiraga used torinoko paper as support for his foot paintings, but at the request of Tapié, who took into consideration marketing strategies, conservation, and transportation of the works, Shiraga introduced canvas, produced works in larger scale, and began to sign his works in
Kanji (Chinese characters) instead of in Roman letters. In the mid-1960s, Shiraga began to explore skis and wooden spatulas, later supplemented by paper rolls and squeegees, as tools for applying oil paint, in addition to the layers of paint he spread with his feet. These tools allowed Shiraga to produce broader stripes, fan-shaped semicircle forms and, after his ordination as Tendai priest in the 1970s, circles of smeared paint, creating a tension between clearly formed shapes and uncontrolled splashes and trails of paint. In the 1970s, Shiraga introduced new shining and vibrant colors of alkyd paint. Around 1980, Shiraga returned to foot painting, in which black and white were the dominant colors, until his death in 2008. The foot paintings became Shiraga’s trademark work, which fit well into Tapié’s strategies in promoting gestural abstract painting in Japan and in the US in the 1950s, owing to Shiraga’s fierce production process and dynamic visual language, which evoked elements of traditional Japanese arts and cultural practices such as
ink wash painting,
calligraphy, Zen practices, and
martial arts. Shiraga’s making of his foot paintings, which the artist occasionally presented publicly, has been well documented by photographs and films, which shaped the increasing recognition of his painting method as work of performance since the early 1960s, for instance, by
Pierre Restany.
Suikoden (Water Margin) series Around 1958 Shiraga, considering the difficulties to identify his works when sent to Europe, began to entitle his foot paintings with the names of figures from
Suikoden (
Water Margin), a 14th-century Chinese novel about 108 warrior heroes and their violent fights for justice. Fascinated with the stories and the vitality of these heroes since his childhood, he repeatedly drew parallels to being an artist, also within a collective structure. Some of Shiraga’s untitled paintings that were created earlier were given titles retrospectively. Shiraga used the names of 106 heroes as titles for his paintings between 1959 and 1965 and reluctantly applied the names of two remaining figures for paintings he created in 2001. As he later said: “The heroes in
Water Margin each have their own unique personalities, and to me each one seems quite extreme. […] And that led me to the sense that my painting should be about personality, about pushing my own personality to the limit. I moved gradually in that direction. In
Water Margin, you see people being heroic and also horrific.” Shiraga, however, did not use these
Suikoden-inspired titles in the exhibitions; instead, the works on display were labeled as
Sakuhin (Work). After his ordination to the Tendai sect in 1974, Shiraga chose Buddhism-related titles instead, such as the names of deities or concepts.
Objects, installation works, and performances In addition to his foot paintings, Shiraga also created conceptual objects, three-dimensional installation artworks, and performances, most of which were produced in the context of Gutai events and exhibitions, reaching from the
Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun in 1955 to Gutai’s projects for the
Expo ’70 in Osaka. For the
Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun in 1955, Shiraga created
Red Logs (commonly also known as
Please Come In) (1955), a cone-shaped construction made of painted wooden logs, into which he cut notches with an axe. The act of production on site was documented through striking photographs, on the basis of which this work has often been considered as public performance; however, Shiraga did not think of this work as either sculpture or performance, but as an extension of his painting practice and as “openings to a picture that could be looked at endlessly”. Shiraga picked the same material of roughly cut (and red painted) wood for several three-dimensional pieces constructed between 1956 and 1957, which, too, made used holes and openings in wooden structures as apparatus to look through, e.g.,
Lense (1956), two
Objects Challenging Red Lumber (1956),
Red Lumber (1956), and
Work (Red Lumber) (1957). In the mid-1960s, Shiraga picked up the shape of semicircles he used in his paintings and created huge objects that formally referred to Japanese
sensu and
ougi hand fans made of paper. At times, Shiraga combined these objects with oil paintings, such as
White Work and Object, White Fan (1966).
Challenging Mud, 1955 At the
First Gutai Art Exhibition at Ohara Hall in Tokyo in October 1955, Shiraga exhibited two large-scale foot paintings, and, in the yard outside,
Red Logs (Please Come In). In the same yard, Shiraga, in the presence of press and photographers, at three occasions during the exhibition, stripped down to his underwear and wrestled in a heap of wall plaster and concrete. This mud, which bore the traces of Shiraga’s crawling and punching, was left on display during the exhibition and discarded afterwards. Documented by striking photographs and film,
Challenging Mud has been considered performance and action art, though Shiraga conceived it as an extension of his foot painting. For the
2nd Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition in summer 1956, Shiraga created two works which formally and materially responded to
Challenging Mud:
Oval, an oval shaped heap of mud completely covered in vinyl sheet, whose organic shape and soft slick texture and hairy applications made it look like a gigantic invertebrate; and
Circle, another heap of earth covered by a plastic sheet. Shiraga’s
16 Individuals, presented at the
9th Ashiya City Art Exhibition in 1956, consisted of sixteen small disk-shaped heaps of cement, all painted in different color combinations and arranged horizontally on a canvas on the floor.
Ultramodern Sanbasō, 1957 Shiraga opened the
Gutai Art on the Stage show at the Sankei Halls in Osaka and Tokyo in 1957. At the beginning of his act, the stage was empty besides painted wooden poles placed against the backdrop. After the poles fell one by one, Shiraga in a red costume and a large mask with formally exaggerated features appeared on the stage and performed his own version of
sanbasō, a traditional celebratory dance of
Noh and
Kyōgen theater. Then, Shiraga, joined by other Gutai members on the stage, shot arrows against another screen in the background.
Concept of shishitsu Among the Gutai members, Shiraga was an important theorist who articulated ideas vital to understanding the group's goal. A key term in Shiraga’s theoretical reflections writings was
shishitsu, meaning temperament and innate disposition in Japanese. In his essays for the
Gutai journal, Shiraga repeatedly described the importance of grasping one’s own innate sensibility, which was to be supplemented by dispositions acquired through individual experiences. This individual sensibility should be physically expressed through the artist’s body and by fitting material. Shiraga adopted Toyama’s categorization of 20th-century painting as either intellectual or emotional, as well as the art critic’s claim that “pure painting” should be an expression of the artist’s sensibility. As he later recalled, “Reading these passages, I wondered which of the two tendencies I belonged to. Based on the works I was creating, I thought I was heading in the emotional direction. I thus concluded that my mission from now on was to reach the farthest end of this emotional direction.” He thus explained his passion for impulsive bodily exertion and for the heavy, thick material of oil paint.
Aspect of violence The recurrent reference of Shiraga’s oeuvre to fleshy, violent acts in the production of his works, to the martial struggle between material and human body (of the artist), and to his fascination with bloody and gruesome material and contents has been widely discussed by scholars. His fascination culminated in works such as his paintings
Inoshishigari (Wild Boar Hunting) I and
II (1963), for which the artist mounted a boar’s hide on a canvas, which he covered with splashes of blood-like red and brown viscous oil paint. As the artist himself articulated: “My art needs not just beauty, but something horrible.” Shiraga’s fascination with violent bodily acts, sanguinity and martiality has been understood as political engagement with the wartime past of Japan, as “coded narrative about the violence of war and the pervasiveness of violence in everyday life” or, in parallel to the Japanese postwar authors of
nikutai bungaku (carnal literature), as liberating “embodiment of individual freedom and subjectivity” in opposition to the totalitarian militarist Japanese regime. Shiraga has never been deployed to the front as a soldier, but he later indicated that his impressions of the devastations by World War II, which he had experienced after his return to Amagasaki, were materialized in his works. According to the artists’ own words, it was also fueled by his childhood experience of seeing injured and dead participants of
danjiri cart-pulling rituals at Shinto festivities in Amagasaki and the region. Shiraga’s fascination with the closeness of bloody violence and beauty has been described as a hedonistically masochistic and “sadistic vein” in his work, but also considered as fed by an understanding of martiality and the grotesque as a part of masculinity, as, for instance, represented in classic Chinese and Japanese literature and painting. == Auctions and notable sales ==