Katsuhiro Yamaguchi

Despite having no formal training in the arts, Yamaguchi was already active even before graduating from the Department of Law at Nihon University in 1951. He participated in the Avant-Garde Artists' Club's Summer Modern Art Seminar in July 1948 and formed the Shichiyōkai group with Shōzō Kitadai and Hideko Fukushima, among others, in August 1948.[5][6] Shichiyōkai members, including Yamaguchi, also formed the Avant Garde Research Group under Kiyoteru Hanada and Tarō Okamoto in 1948, but by 1949 they had merged—alongside the Century Society (Seiki no Kai)—into the Night Society (Yoru no Kai), a discussion and exhibition group active since 1947.[6][7] Crucially, Century Society and Yoru no Kai were explicitly trans-disciplinary groups that included members from different areas of the arts, such as writer Kōbō Abe, poet Hiroshi Sekine, filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara, artist Tarō Okamoto, and critic Kiyoteru Hanada. In 1950, Yamaguchi, Kitadai, Fukushima, and Tatsuo Ikeda left the painting section of Yoru no Kai to form yet another group called Pouvoir.[6] Yamaguchi's perspective on art was further tempered by exposure to materials on László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, and other modernists through the American-run CIE Library at GHQ during the American occupation.[6] The combination of these distinct but inter-related experiences helped Yamaguchi solidify a commitment to the potentials of a cross-disciplinary collaborative approach to artmaking that he then put into practice as a member of the seminal group Jikken Kōbō.[6]

Yamaguchi co-founded Jikken Kōbō in 1951 alongside artists Shōzō Kitadai, and Hideko Fukushima; composers Tōru Takemitsu, Jōji Yūasa, Kazuo Fukushima, Keijirō Satō, Suzuki Hiroyoshi, and Tetsurō Komai; poet Kuniharu Akiyama; photographer Kiyoji Ōtsuji; lighting designer Naoji Imai; pianist Takahiro Sonoda; and engineer Hideo Yamazaki. The group took the surrealist poet and art critic Shūzō Takiguchi as its mentor, but their own approach was equally inspired by Bauhaus and Constructivism.[6] As a member of Jikken Kōbo, Yamaguchi performed in plays, co-created innovative audio-synchronized slide shows, helped design several iterations of the photographic APN series published in the mass-media magazine Asahi Graph, and developed his shadowbox Vitrine series.[6] Yamaguchi would continue to collaborate on occasion with several of the creators he worked with in Jikken Kōbō—Takemitsu Tōru, Satō Keijirō, Takiguchi Shūzō, and non-member Jikken Kōbō collaborator Toshio Matsumoto—over the decades following the group's dissolution. The Vitrine series, proved the most enduring result of Yamaguchi's Jikken Kōbō era. Inspired by the form of shop windows the shadowboxes in this series consisted of paintings on glass panels placed behind two corrugated glass oriented cross-ways to create a refracting grid; as viewers move relative to the vitrines, the painted patterns shift. These more architectural painterly objects provided Yamagichi the chance to collaborate with architects including Kiyoshi Seike and Kenzō Tange as he embedded the vitrines into concrete wall structures or expanded them into wall-sized light-box partitions.[8]

By the 1960s Yamaguchi was experimenting with more sculptural works and experimenting with the contingent relationship between object and space. On a 1961 visit to New York, he met Frederick Kiesler at his studio, which led him to produce a fifteen-part series of articles on Kiesler's life and work for the major art magazine Bijutsu Techō between January 1976 and March 1977, eventually published in book form in 1978.[9] He began producing wire sculptures wrapped in sack cloth from commercial product packaging, magnetic sculptures with re-arrangeable parts, and acrylic sculptures lit from within. At this time he was active in several groups including the Environment Society (Enbairamento no Kai), which put together the 1966 exhibition From Space to Environment, and the Japan Electric Arts Association (Nihon Denki Geijutsu Kyōkai), through which he organized the 1969 exhibition Electromagica ’69: International Psytech Art.[10] He also occasionally participated in Fluxus-related events, such as the 1966 Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo[11] and Expose ’68: Say Something Now, I’m Looking for Something to Say.[12] During the latter half of the decade, Yamaguchi began to articulate an idea of expanded sculpture in his 1967 book Futeikei Bijutsu-ron (Theory of Indeterminate Art), exhibited in the Venice Biennale (1968), and became commissioner for the Mitsui Pavilion at Expo ’70.[12]

Yamaguchi described his experience at Expo ’70 as eye opening, motivating him to shift gears, and leading him to take up the medium of video, with which he had begun experimenting in the late 1960s, in earnest.[12][13] In 1972 he co-founded the Tokyo-based video collective Video Hiroba alongside Fujiko Nakaya, Hakudō Kobayashi, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Masao Kōmura, Toshio Matsumoto, Rikurō Miyai, Shoko Matsushita, Yoshiaki Tōno, Keigo Yamamoto, Sakumi Hagiwara, and Michitaka Nakahara, among others. With this group he developed what art historian Jung-Yeon Ma describes as “video as a social medium,” focused on the concept of communication through both experimental group exhibitions and community projects.[14] Aside from the group activities of Video Hiroba, Yamaguchi also began making video installations, such as his Las Meninas and Video Landscape, both shown at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1974.[15] By the late 1970s Yamaguchi was developing his concept of the Imaginarium that would serve as inspiration for his environmental sculptures of the 1980s and ‘90s.[16][17][18] Aside from his work as an artist, he also began teaching as a professor in the School of Art and Design at University of Tsukuba, where he remained until 1992.

From the 1980s on Yamaguchi became one of the central figures of the media art scene in Japan, with his contributions featuring prominently in a January 1982 issue of the premiere art magazine Bijutsu Techō devoted to the “Media Revolution."[19] His work during the 1980s focused on media installations and performances, and included projects for public locations such as the Seibu Department Store, the Seibu (later Parco) Theater, and the entrance to the O Museum of Art in Osaki New City, Tokyo.[20][18] In 1981 he formed the group “Art-Unis” to help promote technological art and support young artists. He also became a founding director of the International Biennial in Nagoya—Artec from 1989 through 1997.[21]

Yamaguchi retired from University of Tsukuba in 1992 and began teaching at the Kobe University of Design in 1993 where he remained until 1999. He also established a studio on the island of Awaji in the 1990s, and was involved in the development of a multi-arts center on the island.[21][22] He continued to show both in Japan and internationally during this decade, and continued his media collaborations with artists and dancers. In 2001 he was struck with a sudden illness that left him partially disabled and shifted his practice from media art to drawings and paintings produced by hand.[23] A major retrospective of his work was held at The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and The Museum of Modern Art, Ibaraki in 2006,[8] and research projects such as the government funded “Art and Technology in Postwar Japan” project have produced scholarship that has secured Yamaguchi recognition as a central figure of Japanese media art.[24] Exhibitions featuring Jikken Kōbō (The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura; Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo; The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama; Iwaki City Art Museum, Iwaki; Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Kitakyūshū, 2013) and Video Hiroba (Mori Art Museum Research Project, 2016) have made such research more available to the public, while his prominence in Jung-Yeon Ma’s 2014 book Nihon Media Āto-shi (A Critical History of Media Art in Japan)[14] and the appearance of a selected collection of his numerous writings, edited by art and design historian Toshino Iguchi,[25] indicate the continued interest in his ideas within the Japanese media arts and fine arts scenes.