赤瀬川原平

Akasegawa Genpei was born in 1937 in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture. His birth name was Katsuhiko. His father, Hironaga, worked for a warehouse company and was also active as a haiku poet. His older brother, Hayahiko, later became a writer under the name Akasegawa Shun, and his older sister, Haruko, worked as a hat designer. Because of his father’s job transfers, he spent his early childhood moving between Ashiya in Hyogo Prefecture, Moji in Fukuoka Prefecture (now part of Kitakyushu), and Oita in Oita Prefecture. He experienced a major air raid in Oita and remained there through the end of World War II. Throughout elementary and junior high school, he struggled with bedwetting, and after the war his family lived in poverty due to his father’s unemployment. Drawing and painting became a source of comfort for the young Akasegawa and helped him cope with his sense of inferiority. In junior high school, he joined the drama club and produced a newspaper with friends, reflecting his strong cultural interests. Around his second year of junior high school in 1950, he began associating with the art group Shinseiki-gun (New Century Group), which gathered at the city’s only art supply store. There he met the architect Isozaki Arata, who had named the group, as well as the artist Yoshimura Masunobu. In 1952, after his father found new work, the family moved to Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture and he enrolled in the art program at Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka Senior High School. His classmates included Arakawa Shūsaku and Iwata Shin’ichi. After graduating from high school, he entered the Department of Oil Painting at Musashino Art School (now Musashino Art University) but effectively withdrew in 1957. That same year, he submitted work for the first time to the Japan Independent Exhibition, and the following year he also exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. His paintings from this period, which drew on Franz Kafka’s novels and on Africa as subjects, reflected his admiration for the raw, vital energy he had seen in the Mexican Art Exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum in 1955, as well as the influence of the new realism that the critic Hanada Kiyoteru described as “sur-documentary.” At the end of 1959, Yoshimura invited him to join an avant-garde group, which marked the beginning of Akasegawa’s serious artistic activity. In 1960, the group, which had first called itself All Japan, expanded its membership and held an exhibition at Ginza Gallery (Ginza Garō, Tokyo) under the name Neo-Dada Organizers. The show brought together edgy, confrontational works made with organic materials and discarded objects, and Akasegawa also exhibited three-dimensional objects. At a time when anti-art was sweeping the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Neo-Dada, which later changed its name, attracted much attention, including through Shinohara Ushio’s flamboyant performances, and became one of the most visible young avant-garde groups. They held three exhibitions in quick succession and organized several events, but disbanded in 1960 after Yoshimura, the group’s leader, married. Around this time, Akasegawa began using the name Genpei, based on a name divination interpreting the stroke counts of kanji characters performed by Shinohara’s mother. He showed objects made from discarded materials such as tire tubes at the Yomiuri Independent Exhibitions in 1961 and 1962, and in 1962 he was selected for the Shell Art Award Exhibition for the first time, receiving third prize. At the final, 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in 1963, he exhibited a panel on which a thousand-yen note was enlarged to monumental scale, along with a canvas wrapped in kraft paper. Soon after the 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, Akasegawa formed Hi-Red Center with Takamatsu Jirō and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, like-minded artists with whom he had connected through a roundtable discussion. As the group’s name suggests, it operated as a kind of pseudo-corporation, and from 1963 into the following year they carried out a series of deliberately formal events that contrasted with the frenzy surrounding anti-art at the time. During this same period, the thousand-yen note motif that had become Akasegawa’s trademark drew police attention, and by 1965 the situation had escalated to prosecution. The so-called Thousand-Yen Note Trial (or Thousand-Yen Note Incident), which involved many figures from the art world and ended in a finalized guilty verdict in 1970 for violating the law regulating the reproduction of currency, was a rare instance of the state and the art world confronting each other in court and shaped the direction of Akasegawa’s later work. Writing and illustration became central to his practice, in part as a means of supporting himself, and his output adopted a strongly parodic tone that mocked the state and capitalism in sympathy with the New Left movement of the time. Beginning with “Sakura Gahō,” a newspaper-within-a-magazine serialized in “Asahi Journal” from 1970, he published widely in many outlets and became a prominent figure in the world of print media. From 1970, he also taught at the independent art school Bigakkō. The school’s experimental, nonconformist approach encouraged Akasegawa’s meta-artistic interests, and together with his students he developed a perspective that connected close observation of everyday details to broader critiques of society. A notable example of the expanded activities that grew out of his work at Bigakkō was the establishment in 1982 of the Thomasson Hyper-Art Observation Center, which documented curious objects on the streets that had lost their original function, termed “Thomasson” after an underperforming baseball player. Akasegawa had long gathered with acquaintances, including editor Matsuda Tetsuo and Bigakkō student Minami Shinbō, to form various self-organized groups, such as Kakumei Macchishugisha Dōmei (Revolutionary Matchist Alliance, from 1968), Kakumei Chinponshugisha Dōmei (Revolutionary Rare Bookist Alliance, from 1969), Shabarutōsha (from 1969), Royal Tenmon Dōkōkai (Royal Astronomy Club, from 1974), Rojō Kansatsu Gakkai (Street Observation Society, from 1986), Nōnai Resort Kaihatsu Jigyōdan (Intracerebral Resort Development Corporation, from 1992), Leica Dōmei (Leica Alliance, from 1992), Jōmon Kenchikudan (Jōmon Architecture Group, from 1995), and the Japanese Art Cheerleaders (from 1996). These can also be understood as parodies of political or art associations. After the Thousand-Yen Note Trial, most of Akasegawa’s activity was devoted to such sociologically inflected projects that examined society through an artistic lens. As a writer, he published his first novel in 1978, and in 1979 he entered the literary world under the name Otsuji Katsuhiko. In 1981 he won the Akutagawa Prize for “Chichi ga kieta” (Father Has Vanished). His reflections on the 1960s avant-garde in “Tokyo mixer keikaku” (Tokyo Mixer Plan, 1984) and “Ima ya action aru nomi!” (Now Is the Time for Action!, 1985) became essential art-historical sources and exerted considerable influence on later art historical writing. He wrote the screenplay for Teshigahara Hiroshi’s 1989 film “Rikyū,” and his 1998 book “Rōjinryoku” (Geriatric Power) became a bestseller and even gave rise to a popular catchphrase. In 1995, a large-scale solo exhibition was held at the Nagoya City Art Museum. He died of sepsis during the run of the 2014 solo exhibition “Otsuji Katsuhiko × Akasegawa Genpei” at the Machida City Literature Museum, two days before the opening of his second major retrospective, “‘The Principles of art’ by Akasegawa Genpei: From the 1960s to the Present,” at the Chiba City Museum of Art and other venues. While he was a leading figure in the 1960s avant-garde, he stood apart for the breadth of his activity, much of which took forms outside conventional gallery practice. His pursuits ranged widely, yet were consistently marked by wit and an aspiration to deconstruct established conventions. Among his major works of visual art, excluding his writings, manga, illustrations, and related output, are “Sheets of Vagina (Second Present)” (1961, remade in 1994, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), shown at the 13th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition; the enlarged copy of a thousand-yen note “Morphology of Revenge (Watching the Opponent before Killing It)” (1963, Nagoya City Art Museum); “Canned Universe” (1964, remade in 1994, both in private collections); “Model 1,000-Yen Note”(1963, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and other collections), which triggered the Thousand-Yen Note Trial; and “Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note” (original drawings) (1967, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo). (Nariai Hajime / Translated by Christopher Stephens) (Published online: 2026-02-26)