AKASEGAWA GENPEI AS A POPULIST AVANT-GARDE: AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW TO JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE

Abstract

Today, Japanese popular culture asserts such a strong global presence in the form of manga, anime, games, and such - with or without otaku (geek) inflections - that it is almost impossible to think of anything else when we discuss “Japanese popular culture” and visual-art practices informed by it. However, postwar Japan boasts a long and diverse tradition of popular culture, not all of which has been known outside the country. A notable example is Akasegawa Genpei, an artist who emerged as a young practitioner of Anti-Art (Han-geijutsu) in the 1960s and since made a remarkable transition to the realm of popular culture, while maintaining his vanguard spirit and conceptualist strategies. This essay explores Akasegawa’s unique practices from the 1960s to the present, in which art, society, and popular culture intersect in often unforeseen and strange ways.