Artist Kazuo Shiraga, 83
Posted: Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 7:32 pm1924 - April 8, 2008
Kazuo Shiraga was a distinguished Japanese avant-garde artist noted for his unusual method: using his own body to apply paint to the canvas. Revolutionary in the 1950s, this technique now seems to anticipate later international developments in performance art and conceptual art.
Born in Hyogo Prefecture in Western Japan, Shiraga initially studied Japanese-style painting at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Arts (now the Kyoto City University of Arts). After graduating in 1948, however, he gravitated towards Western styles, taking up oil painting. In the aftermath of Japan’s wartime defeat, the time was ripe for iconoclasm, and in 1952 he became a founder member, along with Akira Kanayama, Saburo Murakami and Keiko Tanaka, of the “Zero Group”, so named because of the artists’ belief that every work of art is created from nothing. By 1955, he and his fellow Zero Group artists had joined a more significant avant-garde movement: the Gutai Art Association… Read full obituary
