was a Japanese visual and performance artist. He was a member of the Gutai Art Association and is best known for his paper-breaking performances (kami-yaburi) in which he burst through kraft paper stretched on large wooden frames. Paper-breaking is a canonical work in the history of Japanese post-war art and for the history of performance art.Shigeo Chiba, Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi 1945–1985 (A history of deviations in contemporary art, 1945–1985), Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1986; Bruce Altshuler, 1863–1959: Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made Art History, Vol. 1. London: Phaidon, 2008; Raiji Kuroda, Nikutai no anākizumu: 1960-nendai Nihon bijutsu ni okeru pafōmansu no chikasuimyaku / Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan, Tokyo: grambooks, 2010; Catherine Wood, Performance in Contemporary Art, London: Tate Publishing, 2018. Murakami's work includes paintings, three-dimensional objects and installation as well as performance, and is characterized by a highly conceptual approach that transcends dualistic thinking and materializes in playful interactive forms and often thematizes time, chance and intuition.
Biography Saburo Murakami was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1925, as the third son of an English teacher at Kwansei Gakuin Junior High School. He entered Kwansei Gakuin University in 1943, joined the university's painting club Gengetsu-kai and began studying oil painting under Hiroshi Kanbara. After World War II, he resumed his studies, graduating from Kwansei Gakuin in 1948. In 1949, Murakami participated in the exhibitions of the art association Shinseisakuha kyōkai and began to study under painter Tsugurō Itō.Atsuo Yamamoto, "Saburo Murakami: An Improvisor who Plays with Space and Time," Saburo Murakami Exhibition, exhib. cat., Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, 1996, pp. 15–24, here p. 18. In 1950, Murakami began working as an art teacher at an elementary school. He continued to teach art in elementary, middle and high schools, universities and kindergartens throughout his life. In 1951 he enrolled in aesthetics at Kwansei Gakuin's graduate school."Chronology," Murakami Saburō: Through the '70s, Osaka: ARTCOURT Gallery, 2013, p. 144. In the early 1950s, he participated in several group exhibitions, such as the exhibitions of the Shinseisaku Kyōkai (between 1949 and 1954) and the Ashiya City Exhibitions (from 1952 until his death). In 1952 Murakami formed the Zero-kai (Zero Group)Akira Tatehata, "The Eve of Gutai," 1953: Shedding Light on Art in Japan, Tokyo: Tama Art University, 1996, pp. 67–74. with Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, and Akira Kanayama, all fellows from the Shinseisaku Kyōkai. In 1953, he held his first two-person exhibitions with Yasuo Nakagawa and Kazuo Shiraga. In spring 1955, the Zero-kai members joined the Gutai Art Association, led by Jiro Yoshihara.Shōichi Hirai, "Chronology," Gutai: Splendid Playground, exhib. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013, pp. 286–299, here p. 286.
During his membership in Gutai from 1955 until 1972, Murakami presented his works mainly within Gutai projects, including the Outdoor Art Exhibitions at Ashiya Park in 1955 and 1956, the Gutai Art Exhibitions, the Gutai Art on the Stage shows in 1957 and 1958, the International Sky Festival in 1960, and Gutai's participation in Expo '70. Murakami's first solo exhibition took place at the Gutai Pinacotheca in 1963. Murakami was also a fixture in the group's international collaborations with French art critic Michel Tapié, art dealers Rodolphe Stadler in Paris and Martha Jackson in New York, and with the artist groups ZERO and Nul in Germany and the Netherlands.Naoki Yoneda, "From Ashiya to Amsterdam: Gutai's Exhibition Spaces," GUTAI: The Spirit of an Era, exhib. cat., The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2012, pp. 256–259. In 1960, Murakami was appointed the Japanese representative at the International Centre of Aesthetic Research Committee in Turin."Chronology," Murakami Saburō: Through the '70s, p. 146. In 1966, on behalf of Gutai, Murakami travelled to the Netherlands to facilitate the group's participation in exhibitions with the Dutch and German artists groups Nul and ZERO."Chronology," Murakami Saburō: Through the '70s, p. 146. Murakami remained a Gutai member until 1972. Erudite in literature, aesthetics and philosophy, he was considered the "philosopher" among the Gutai members.
Beginning in 1972, Murakami's work increasingly included performance and interaction with the visitors of his exhibitions in galleries in Osaka and Kobe. Around 1975, Murakami became involved in the artist collaborative Artist Union (AU) formed by fellow Gutai artist Shōzō Shimamoto and organized exhibitions, symposiums and mail art projects. He continued to exhibit new works in group exhibitions such as the Ashiya City Exhibitions, but he also participated in an increasing number of exhibitions worldwide featuring Gutai.
In 1990 he became a full professor of Kobe Shoin Women's Junior College, where he had taught art since 1950. Murakami died in 1996 of a cerebral contusion. At that time, he was preparing his first retrospective at the Ashiya City Museum of Art & History.
Personal life In 1950, he married Makiko Yamaguchi. Their son Tomohiko Murakami, born in 1951, is a critic and researcher of manga and pop culture and has been a professor at Kobe Shoin Women's University."Murakami Tomohiko," List of committee members, Japan Media Arts Festival Archive site, http://archive.j-mediaarts.jp/en/profile/MURAKAMI_Tomohiko/ (retrieved January 20, 2021). Murakami recounted that his paper-breaking was inspired by his toddler son, who in a tantrum burst through the fusuma paper space divider at their home.Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism, London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 24–25.
Artwork Around 1953, Murakami gave up figurative painting and began making abstract paintings with surfaces that were structured in impastoed segments of oil paint. In the mid-1950s, he began to experiment with methods of applying paint, such as throwing a ball, which he had dipped into color, onto sheets of paper. Murakami's discovery of tearing paper and other surfaces as a method of artistic production marked a turning point in his approach to painting and provided the basis for his later performance works.Murakami Saburō: Through the '70s, pp. 69, 108.
For the First Gutai Art Exhibition at Ohara Hall in Tokyo in 1955, Murakami stretched paper onto wooden frames, burst through the paper, and put the remaining ripped paper on display. The first version Muttsu no ana (6 Holes) from 1955 posed the question of what constitutes the actual artwork – the object, the performance or the photography.Jun Shioya, "Mono yori omoide, omoide yori mono," "Orijinaru" no yukue: Bunkazai o tsutaeru tame ni: Dai 32kai Bunkazai no hozon oyobi shūfuku ni kansuru kokusai kenkyū shūkai / The 32th International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, Tokyo: National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, 2010, pp. 17–35. Murakami continued to perform the act of paper-breaking (kami-yaburi) throughout his entire life, varying in the number and quality of paper screens as well as in the structure.Photographs of the first public performance Muttsu no ana (6 Holes) from the First Gutai Art Exhibition in 1955 are often confounded with those of the version called Tsūka (Passage) performed at the Second Gutai Art Exhibition in 1956. For a survey of the different versions, see Murakami Saburō: Through the '70s, pp. 108–117.
For the Gutai group's experimental projects like the Outdoor Art Exhibitions of 1955 and 1956, the Gutai Art Exhibitions between 1955 and 1971, and the Gutai Art on the Stage shows of 1957 and 1958, Murakami contributed interactive three-dimensional conceptual objects and performances of tearing paper. Examples include Hako (Box) (1956), a wooden box with a ticking and ringing clock inside, Kūki (Air) (1956), a box made of plexiglass that contained nothing but air, and Arayuru fūkei (All Landscapes) (1957), a simple wooden frame hanging from the branches of a tree. In 1957, Murakami created a number of paintings applying nikawa, an animal glue used in Nihonga painting, to the canvas, with the effect that the surface gradually peels off with time.Atsuo Yamamoto, "Saburo Murakami: An Improvisor who Plays with Space and Time," here p. 20.
Between 1958 and 1963, when Gutai was working with the French art critic and advocate of Informel, Michel Tapié, Murakami created gestural abstract paintings with multiple layers of synthetic resin paint applied in dynamic rough movements and streaming down the surface. He experimented with varying the structures of surfaces by attaching wooden frames or molded plaster. From 1963 onward, Murakami adopted a new style in his paintings by reducing the number of colors of paint and simplifying the pictorial formal elements, by which he thematized the boundaries of painting.
As a further questioning of painting, in 1970, he stuck together the front sides of two canvasses so that only the backsides of the frames were visible and covered the structure with paint. In 1971, Murakami held a solo exhibition, during which wooden boxes were placed throughout the city of Osaka and then collected and dismantled in the gallery Mori's Form.Murakami Saburō: Through the '70s, pp. 10–17. After this exhibition, Murakami submitted his resignation from Gutai, which was rejected by Yoshihara."Chronology," Murakami Saburō: Through the '70s, p. 147. After Gutai dissolved following Yoshihara's death in 1972, Murakami's exhibitions, which he held in galleries in Osaka and Kobe, increasingly centered around events of performance and interaction with the visitors. Painting and drawing often were part of these events, such as in the case of Suji (Lines) at Shinanobashi Gallery Apron in Osaka in 1974, during which Murakami's work consisted in the act of drawing a line on sheets of paper with the arrival of each visitor.Murakami Saburō: Through the '70s, pp. 38–39. He also continued to create conceptual objects and installation artworks, which were shown in group exhibitions, e.g. the Ashiya City Exhibitions and projects by the Artists Union. From the 1980s onward Murakami recreated some of his works from the early Gutai years and performed paper-breaking for the increasing number of exhibitions worldwide that featured Gutai from a historical perspective.
Murakami was also a renowned painter, whose highly conceptual methods and presentation led to experimentation with a variety of painting gestures inspired by children. A central premise of his work was the playfulness of the creative act of painting.
Murakami's art is characterized by a highly conceptual, relational and at the same time strongly intuitive approach that often materialized in seemingly simple works that bring into focus the effects and the experience of space and time, chance and intuition. Murakami's paintings, three-dimensional objects and performances challenged preconceptions on painting, art and perception of the world at large, and are considered as important examples of performance and conceptual art in Japan.Reiko Tomii, "村上三郎の"絵"の心 / Murakami Saburo's "Picture" Mind," Murakami Saburo: Through the '70s, Osaka: ARTCOURT Gallery, 2013.Reiko Tomii, "Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan," Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, exhib. cat., New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999, pp. 14–29.