Japan Society is pleased to present Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus. Spanning the organization’s full gallery space in New York City and featuring over 100 works, this will be the first exhibition to fully explore the essential role of Japanese women in Fluxus, a transnational movement that began in the early 1960s as a network of artists, composers, and poets who crossed boundaries and defined new modes of artistic expression.
Near the 60th anniversary of the movement’s founding, this exhibition at Japan Society highlights the contributions of four pioneering Japanese artists — Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), Yoko Ono (b. 1933), Takako Saito (b. 1929), and Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938) — and contextualizes their role within Fluxus and the broader artistic movements of the 1960s and beyond. The Latin word “fluxus,” meaning a “continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing stream,” indicates the importance placed by Fluxus artists on the concepts of fluidity and indeterminacy. Avoiding conventional artistic forms such as painting and sculpture, Fluxus artists found new means of expression in film, music, performance, publishing, and the appropriation of mass-produced objects. The movement challenged aesthetic traditions by investing chance occurrences and the ephemera and actions of daily life with artistic value and meaning.
To learn more and purchase tickets, please visit japansociety.org.
