Your Portrait was one of Tetsumi Kudo's favorite and most frequently used titles. While the word "you" indicated the person looking at the work, suggesting that we are all constrained by a variety of established values and conventions, it also referred to Kudo himself as the work's first viewer. Further, it was intended as a portrait of the human race as the unavoidable victim of radioactive contamination.

With images such as eyeballs and noses growing alongside transistors, bloated cerebrums riding in baby carriages, male genitals swimming in aquariums with little fish, and human figures forming cat's cradles out of chromosomes while meditating in a birdcage, Kudo's works might seem to be weird or repulsive. Are they perhaps meant to be a depiction of some sort of wretched futuristic hell? No, on the contrary, this was Kudo’s vision of a paradoxical paradise in which, in order to survive, human beings would be forced to live in harmony with nature and technology. 

In this retrospective, we present a wealth of works, including everything from the artist's early paintings, a wide range of objects and drawings that incorporate motifs such as birdcages and aquariums to a deck chair that could not be included in the 1994 retrospective, and a highly creative group of works from the mid-'60s that made use of baby carriages. The exhibition also includes photographs of Happenings and Performances, and related documents. Along with nearly all of Kudo’s works from domestic museums, we have borrowed pieces from Western museums and collectors to create a comprehensive survey of Tetsumi Kudo's over 30-year career, including approximately 200 works that have never been shown in Japan.

The exhibition is a collaborative project between three institutions: The National Museum of Art, Osaka, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Aomori Museum of Art. It is significant that the event will be held in these places, as they represent three important stages in Kudo’s life: Osaka was the city of his birth; Tokyo was his home when he became a standard-bearer of Anti-art; and Aomori was where he spent his impressionable youth.

*image (left)
Votre portrait - liberté d'etalon(Your Portrait - Freedom of Studhorse), 1973, Yonetsu Gallery,
photo:Kazuo Fukunaga
© ADAGP, Paris & JASPAR, Tokyo, 2013