Group Kyūshū (九州派, Kyūshū-ha, also translated as "Kyūshū School") is an avant-garde art collective, formed in 1957 in the city of Fukuoka (Kyūshū Island) and active until the late 1960s. The group, whose composition fluctuated over time, had about 20 members that participated in several exhibitions in Fukuoka and Tokyo, produced a journal (Kyūshū-ha) relating their activity and their ambition and organized multiple performances and exhibitions in Fukuoka. Most of the members had no art education and located far from the nerve center of contemporary art that was Tokyo, therefore their local anchoring was intended to make the social institution of art more stable in Fukuoka and expand the art-practicing population. Kyūshū-ha aspired to repudiate modernism and reinterpret art. In its embrace of seikatsu-sha, or ordinary people who honestly live their everyday lives (seikatsu), it sought, as a collective, to create a dynamic movement (undō) that combined artistic and social innovation. This social ambition is representative of the social and political climate of the time and the birth of the labor union movement that was particularly vivid in the Fukuoka area (as shown by the Mitsui-Miike coalmine dispute in 1960), in which some members of the group participated. Stylistically, the artists of Kyūshū-ha experienced the shock of the gestural Art Informel in 1956–57, and toward and into the 1960s they shifted from expressionistic Informel painting to objet-based three-dimensional works that incorporated readymade everyday objects (with their trademark being tar). Their aesthetic, violent even nihilistic works, as well as their iconoclastic theoretical ambition brings them in line with the Anti-Art movement (Han-geijutsu), having notably exhibited in Yomiuri Independent, a hotbed of this trend. Despite their attempt to broaden their visibility, notably by emphasizing their regional and decentralized ambitions, the group never received the popular attention they had hoped for. Similarly, despite some critical attention, the uneven and unprofessional nature of their practices prevented them from founding a sustainable movement. Their first major experimentation with Happenings failed in 1962, and the group soon lost its collective unity, leading to the group's dissolution in the late 1960s.
Members Group Kyūshū's membership fluctuated a lot over the years, generally averaged twenty or so members. A membership list was published in each issue of its journal Kyūshū-ha, up through volume 5 (1961).
Takami Sakurai, Osamu Ochi, Mamoru Matano and Yasuyuki Ishibashi were key founding members who participated in the Persona exhibition (Perusona-ten), an outdoor exhibition along the outer wall of the Fukuoka prefectural offices that took place in November 1956.
Other core members include Mitsuko Tabe, Yoriko Chō, Takeshi Owari, Hidesuke Obata, Aiko Ōguro, Uichi Ōyama, Junnosuke Miyazaki, Shigeharu Obana, Toku Yonekura, and Toshio Taniguchi. Together with the key founding members, these eight made important intellectual contributions to the group, with all but Obana and Taniguchi staying with the group through the end.
Jūtarō Yamauchi, Mokuma Kikuhata, and Tadashi Hataraki were critical of Sakurai. Yamauchi and Kikuhata, together with Ochi, formed the spin-off group Dōkutsu-ha (Cave School).
Other artists have also participated, more or less temporarily, in the activities of the group: Yōji Kuroki, Ken'ichirō Terada, Shin Kinoshita, Seiryō Surusumi, Hidesaburō Saitō, Yoshiharu Funaki, Yutaka Yagara, Masatoshi Katae, Sumio Morigana.
Kyūshū-ha was characterized by its democratic, non-hierarchical, that paralleled Circle Village (a poet circle created by Gan Tanigawa and also based in Fukuoka). It consisted of due-paying members : at the time of its founding the monthly due was 1,000 yen (later raised to 2,000 yen). Special fees of 10,000 yen were collected when the group held the Kyūshū-ha exhibition in Tokyo and participated in the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition.
Almost none of the members of Group Kyūshū were formally trained as artists, and hailing from the southernmost island of Japan (Kyūshū), they were remote from the center of haute culture, Tokyo. Most of the group members had no art education, nor any contacts in the art world in Tokyo or internationally. Reacting against what they saw as a stifling exhibition system that relied on personal connections and master-disciple relationships, they put great energy into fighting against the various institutions of the art establishment. Kyūshū-ha was a group of painters residing in and around Fukuoka, who were first and foremost seikatsu-sha and rōdō-sha (blue-collar workers and other wage earners) strongly motivated by the collective creation of a "movement" (undō). They had very little money and their shared workspace was an off-season beach cabana. The rise of the labor union movement, represented by the Mitsui Miike dispute, formed the ideological background for the group.Gallery MORYTA Kyushu-ha Kyūshū-ha sought to pursue an artistic revolution without neglecting the revolution of seikatsu in the socio-political sphere, bringing art to the normal working class was one of their main goals. Members discussed and often fought over the direction of the group, which perhaps contributed to frequent factional splits. Most significantly, Sakurai's expansive "people's front" strategy, intended to encourage an expansion of membership among the masses, was ultimately defeated by Kikuhata's guerrilla tactics, which favored a group of a select and talented few, leading to the creation of a spin-off group Dōkutsu-ha (Cave School) in 1959.
Activities
Early years (1957-1959) The activities of the group encompassed activities as studio critique and other meetings; the presentation of exhibitions, including the annual Kyūshū-ha exhibition (1957-1967), to showcase members' works; and the publication of the journal Kyūshū-ha (1957-1968). Especially in the early years, the group endeavored to create a broad alliance with other anti-establishment artists and groups, issuing a statement protesting the conservative Fukuoka Prefectural Art Exhibition and organizing the Kyūshū Independent Exhibition in 1958 and 1959. Sakurai, along with Matano, participated in the Persona exhibition (Perusona-ten) in November 1956, which took place in Fukuoka and marked the beginning of Kyūshū-ha. In August 1957 was held the exhibition 18 Artists of Group Q, at the Iwataya department store, Fukuoka, signaling the official formation of the group, followed by the first publication of Kyūshū-ha journal, in September. Around February 1958, the group rented a clubhouse on the Momoji swimming beach, which would become their main production and gathering place. The works produced there both individually and collaboratively were exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent in March 1958, with some bearing the collective authorship of Kyūshū-ha. At the occasion, the Group tried to submit Garbage Piece.Art History: Japan 1945-2014 by Nakazawa Hideaki, page 27 While packing up for the exhibition, the group members found a pile of garbage in front of their atelier. As a joke they decided to bring the garbage to the exhibition as well, after Kikuhata urinated on it. The piece was rejected, and Kyūshū-ha earned the dubious distinction of being the first art group to have had one of their works rejected from the open-submission Yomiuri exhibition. In August 1958, they held the first Kyūshū-ha exhibition at Ginza Gallery in Tokyo, launching the more or less annual tradition of the group's collective presentation in Tokyo that continued through 1965.
During this early period, stylistically, the gestural Informel abstraction dominated, many members incorporating asphalt and objets. Asphalt, imbued with theoretical, social and historical significances, was the most important material to characterize Kyūshū-ha during this period. A cheap, mundane material, asphalt was closely associated with local everyday life. Its black color could symbolize the coalmining industry that sustained the economy of Kyūshū and its shiny materiality, the energy of the bottom-living masses. It was an emblematic material suited to Kyūshū-ha's endeavor to create historically and socially meaningful art. These first years are also marked by the introduction of objets (ready-made objects) : Sakurai (Lynching, rinchi) and Kikuhata (Requiem, Sōsōkyoku) incorporated dimension objets in two-dimensional paintings; while Ochi used objets as the support for painting. The Group has also set up collaborative creation protocols, questioning the modern notion of individualism, with pieces like Straw Mat- Straw Mat (Mushiro-mushiro) byYamauchi, Ochi, and Ishibashi; and Torn- Apart Individuality (Hikisakareta) attributed to fifteen members. However, the group already showed signs of disharmony. Sakurai's plan to expand the membership met resistance; Terada was forced out because he continued to participate in the exhibitions of Nika; as a result, three primary members, Ochi, Kikuhata, and Yamauchi, left and organized Dōkutsu-ha (Cave School) in late 1959.
Middle period (1960-1963) Between 1960 and 1962, the group radicalized its approach to objet-based works, exhibiting earthy and strange works made of paint, reed mats, wood, rope, wire, springs, nails, cardboard, mannequin parts, cement. Unlike Pop artists which used the products of contemporary society to critique life dominated by mass production and mass consumption as impersonal, Kyūshū-ha artists embraced articles simply and manually made and used at farming villages, such as mushiro straw mats (Ishibashi); sudare reed blinds, cigarette butts, screens (Ochi); and ropes (Tabe). Ochi continued to pioneer in this direction. In his sometimes menacing objets, he shed the strategy of early Kyūshū-ha, which deployed a copious amount of material and produced huge works in order to shock the viewer. However, the danger in Ochi' s method was that it would sooner or later lead to nihilism. The desperate nihilism found in these works strikes a very different chord from the earlier Kyūshū-ha, which was characterized by primal energy and an optimistic impulse for destruction. These works now intimated the growing isolation and imminent crisis Kyūshū-ha faced as an avant-garde collective. Although Ochi was the member to enjoy the most critical attention in Kyūshū-ha, he was no stranger to what can be described as an "exit-less" situation, the only thing left for them to do was self-destruct.
Happenings that involved bodily acts became a major element that characterized the late-middle period which climaxed at A Grand Meeting of Heroes staged at the Momoji swimming beach in November 1962. They performed a series of happenings composing what they called a “festival of darkness” (yami no shukusai), including Obata's slaughtering of chickens, Ōyama's burning of an altar made of junk objects, Tabe's driving of nails into the heads of mannequins, Junnosuke's holes digging on the sand beach. Some members of Group Ongaku were also invited, whose more urbane and intellectual approach to performance contrasted sharply with that of Kyūshū-ha. The Grand Meeting itself had grown out of a critical failure, with no audience attending. The Group held the second Kyūshū-ha exhibition in its hometown, Fukuoka, in December 1963, at the Shinten Kaikan hall, but the attention of the critics and the art world had already waned.
Late period (1964-1968)