‘The Rainbow Artist’ lands in Hiroshima! A Retrospective Exhibition Spanning More Than Fifty Years

Ay-O: Over the Rainbow Once More is a large-scale retrospective exhibition looking back on more than fifty years of the career of one of the foremost Japanese avant-garde artists, Ay-O (born 1931), known as ‘The Rainbow Artist’. In the 1950s, Ay-O joined the Demokrato Artists Association, which was formed in criticism of existing art groups. His avant-garde activities have since continued to this day, crossing a variety of mediums, from two-dimensional oil paintings and prints to so-called ‘environments’, or installations that involve their surrounding environments and appeal to their viewers’ five senses. By reviewing the artist’s career, this retrospective presents a reconsideration of the rich diversity of Ay-O’s expression, which stems from a voracious spirit of experimentation.

［作家プロフィール］
Born in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1931, Ay-O, together with On Kawara and others, joined the Demokrato Artists Association—an artists’ association formed around EiQ, an avant-garde artist who represents postwar Japan—in 1953, and attracted attention with the works he presented in such exhibitions as the Demokrato Exhibition and the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. He also became acquainted with the art critic Sadajiro Kubo around this time, which led him to become more active in printmaking. Prints were still considered to be a lower art form than such mediums as oil painting and sculpture at this time. Ay-O contributed to moving prints onto the center stage of artistic expression, along with other Demokrato members such as Masuo Ikeda, and the medium eventually came to hold an important position in his work. In 1958, Ay-O traveled and relocated to New York, with a strong admiration for Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock at heart. There, he joined the avant-garde art movement ‘Fluxus’, led by George Maciunas, and took on the challenge of working with a variety of different forms of expression. As a Fluxus member, he participated in performances by creators from different fields such as artists and musicians, known as ‘events’, and created works with the new concept of ‘multiples’ which made them available to a greater number of people. He also made installations known as ‘environments’ and many other works that could be directly touched and experienced by viewers. Finally, he rebelled against the concept of creating works consisting of lines, instead filling his motifs with the colors of the spectrum, from red to violet. Ay-O’s struggle with the rainbow was expressed in a variety of genres including prints, paintings, and installations, bringing him international renown as ‘The Rainbow Artist’.