Hi-Red Center (ハイレッド・センター, Haireddo Sentā) was a Japanese artistic collective, founded in May 1963 and consisting of artists Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Jirō Takamatsu, that organized and performed anti-establishment happenings. Taking the urban environment of Tokyo as their canvas, the group sought to create interventions that blurred the lines between art and everyday life and raised questions about centralized authority and the role of the individual in society.
Later considered to have been one of the most prominent and influential Japanese art groups of the 1960s, Hi-Red Center never officially disbanded, but their happening Cleaning Event in October 1964 proved to be their final artistic action.
Formation Akasegawa had previously participated in the short-lived Neo-Dada Organizers, a similar art collective focused on performance art and happenings. Nakanishi and Takamatsu worked together to stage Yamanote Line Incident (1962) (detailed below) in October 1962, subsequently participating in the "Signs of Discourse on Direct Action" symposium sponsored by Keishō art magazine held November that year, with Akasegawa as an interloctor.Faris, Jaimey Hamilton. "Rooms in Alibi: How Akasegawa Genpei Framed Capitalist Reality." ARTMargins 4, no. 3 (2015): 40-64.“Chokusetsu kōdō no kizashi: Hitotsu no jikkenrei ni tsuite” [Signs of Direct Action— Concerning One Experiment] Keisho, no. 7 (February 1963): 15–23; and Keisho, no. 8 (June 1963): 1–18 The symposium examined the relationship between artistic and political action, and allowed the three artists to reflect on the waning of political activity in Japan. All three artists had begun as painters but would embrace methods of “direct action” in their work with Hi-Red Center, borrowing a term from prewar socialist agitators. With “direct action,” the artists meant to raise to consciousness the absurdities and contradictions of Japanese society. This interest in Art as direct action has been contextualised as rooted in the atmosphere following massive Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960. They were united to move toward “events” for an “uneventful” time.
These discussions at the symposium led the artists to work together again to present their three-person show, "Fifth Mixer Plan," at the Dai-Ichi Gallery in Shinjunku and thus found the group Hi-Red Center in May 1963. The name "Hi-Red Center" was derived from the first kanji characters of their surnames: “高, taka” (high), “赤, aka” (red), and “中, naka” (center).
Collective Practice Hi-Red Center is known for "breaking away from the urban centrality of the Tokyo art scene and the focus on the museum/gallery as the core location for the production and consumption of art."Pendleton, Mark. "Bringing little things to the surface: intervening into the Japanese post-Bubble impasse on the Yamanote." In Japan Forum, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 257-276. Routledge, 2018. By staging these events in the public realm, they acted anonymously while breaching the boundary between art and life. Their happenings were not a mere displacement of art to the streets, but inherently reshaped the relationship between objects and performance.Augst, Bertrand. Discourse 22, no. 2 (2000): 127-34. . Akasegawa in particular questioned the ways in which objects, actions, and environments gained coherence in relationship to each other and how artistic intervention acts could disrupt this. Furthermore, they wished to pronounce how their small gestures and ordinary objects were intertwined with inherent “structures” (as Nakanishi called them) or “systems” (as Akasegawa called them in Capitalist Realism), such as newspapers, currency, commodity circulation, train lines, and public sanitation. Shigeko Kubota and George Maciunas' edited map sheet Bundle of Events (1965) represents the corpus of the group's city interventions on a notational cartographic form, implying the confluence of their activities with the urban landscape.
While the group is associated with the Fluxus movement (and its Japanese counterparts), art historian Reiko Tomii suggests it would be a mistake to interpret it through the history and confines Euro-American movements.Tomii, Reiko. “Hi Red Center, Great Panorama Exhibition” . In Mathieu Copeland and Balthazar Lovau (eds.), The Anti-Museum, 2017, 47-50. London: Koening Books and Fri Art. Instead, Hi-Red Center's activities can be seen to follow the demise of Anti-Art (Han-geijutsu) in Japan (in the 1960s),Yoshimoto, Midori. "Off Museum! Performance Art That Turned the Street." Performance paradigm 2 (2006): 108-122. which can be traced to the phenomenon called "Informel Whirlwind," a Japanese version of gestural abstraction. Hi-Red Center prefigured collaborative collectivism, bridging Anti-Art to Non-Art (Hi-geijutsu) movements (in the 1970s),Tomii, Reiko. "After the “Descent to the Everyday”: Japanese Collectivism from Hi Red Center to The Play, 1964–1973." In Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, edited by STIMSON BLAKE and SHOLETTE GREGORY, 45-75. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Accessed March 28, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv1dg.7 . with Anti-Art collectivism being more viscerally driven and Non-Art collectivism more cerebrally engaged.Tomii, Reiko. ""Art Outside the Box" in 1960s Japan: An Introduction and Commentary." Review of Japanese Culture and Society 17 (2005): 1-11. Accessed March 28, 2021. . These artists' experimentations with form can be characterised as the dematerialization of art, comparable to global developments of conceptual and post-minimalist art.
Anti-Art gained popularity in the Japanese vanguard art scene through the annual Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition (1949-1963), the annual exhibition where Hi-Red Center (and other collectives such as Kyushu-ha, Group Ongaku, Zero Dimension [Zero Jigen], Jikan-ha [Time School]) were active. Artists at the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition “advocated making junk art and violent demonstrations to protest the conventional practice of art”, degrading Art's status as rarefied objects to commonplace items. Reiko Tomii notes that Hi-Red Center treated this redefinition of the position of Art more directly, enabling Art to descend to everyday life by making everyday life and spaces the site of their work. The group had suspicions about the constraints of traditional art exhibition spaces—“what is offered to the public, at which venue, by whom, under what circumstances, resulting in what reception?”.Tomii, Reiko. "State v.(anti-) art: Model 1,000-yen note incident by Akasegawa Genpei and company." positions: east asia cultures critique 10, no. 1 (2002): 141-172.
Art historian Reiko Tomii argues that the shift from the display of objects in an exhibition format to the installation and organisation of “Happenings” (hapuningu), “events” (ivento), and “rituals” (gishiki) in "extraexhibtion projects" required extensive collaboration inter and intra collectives. Thus, Hi-Red Center's form of Anti-Art practice can also be said to be postmodern, in its questioning of the notions of sole authorship, individualism and originality in modern art.
Akasegawa referred to the group's work as "secret art", with no "officially fixed form" and existing "in the form of rumours". This reflected the Happenings event nature of their work, despite requiring prior planning by the group members. However, this quality of secrecy was influenced by the group being consisted of anonymous members that participated in the organisation of events, without being officially credited.Melnikova, Daria. "Body, Camera, Action: Understanding the Metamorphosis of Performance Art in Japan." (2018). Even the group's name was intended to form a was a fictional character called Mr. "Hi Red Center", similar to Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy.
Events Other events not detailed below include Waseda University Event (November 22, 1962),Merewether, Charles, Rika Iezumi Hiro, and Reiko Tomii. Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-1970. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007. where the group painted the urinals of a lecture hall at Waseda University’s red, and Ropology (August 1963).
Yamanote Line Incident (October 18, 1962) Staged on 18 October 1962, Natsuyuki and Takamatsu boarded a Yamanote loop line train heading counter-clockwise on its route, disrupting the normalcy of passenger's commutes through a series of performative actions. While this event was staged prior to the official formation of the group, it demonstrates the core ethos of their subsequent works from 1963 onwards.
Nakanishi positioned himself in the centre of the train carriage, his face painted white and seemingly absorbed in a book. He carried Compact Objects or objets, transparent forms about the size and shape of an ostrich egg, with sundry or "junk" items such as wristwatches, bits of rope, sunglasses, bottle caps and human hair encased in resin. Nakanishi proceeded to lick his objects, also shining a flashlight upon onlooker’s faces to observe their reactions. Prior to boarding the carriage at Ueno Station,Paik, Nam June. “To Catch Up or Not to Catch Up with the West: Hijikata and Hi Red Center.” In Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, edited by Alexandra Munroe, 77–82. New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Takamatsu had unravelled his 3.5 km long Point-string, knotted with similar domestic objects, on the station platform. Later, he stood on the side of the carriage, reading a newspaper with holes in them. Other participants, such as Murata Kiichi, applied white face paint and brought additional objects, including rope, real eggs and a chicken foot.Chong, Doryun, Michio Hayashi, Mika Yoshitake, and Miryam Sas. Tokyo, 1955-1970: A New Avant-garde. The Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Murai Tokuji documented the happening with photography, depicting the puzzled expressions of commuters watching Nakanishi. Akasegawa was also present as a photographer.
William Marotti characterizes this work as an intervention into quietness (or calmness), Nakanishi and Genpei situating the work in the wake of large-scale post-war upheavals (such as the 1960 Anpo US–Japan Security Treatyprotests).Marotti, W., 2013. Money, trains, and guillotines: art and revolution in 1960s Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 18. They saw the train systems as a "terrain of the everyday", using the individual bodies of the artists to demonstrate how these symbolic events have long-lasting effects on the citizen body, long after public political discourse and dissent wanes. Thus, this quietness or calmness is qualified on the level of public consciousness, rather than a literal silence or emptiness. The choice of staging the event on the Yamanote loop, one of the busiest commuter lines,Wade, Mackenzie. "The Yamanote Loop: Unifying Rail Transportation and Disaster Resilience in Tokyo." (2020). demonstrates this prioritisation. Their choice of setting can also be attributed to the larger desire for “direct action” (chokusetsu kodo), in the wake of waning public protests post-Anpo.
Mark Pendleton argues that this work, and its form of intervention into the everyday, has influenced the ethos of subsequent collectives in the 1970s, such as Video Earth Tokyo. The collective also situated their work in the Tokyo train system, installing a dining table and hosting a meal on a subway carriage in Shukutaku ressha/Video Picnic (1975).
Fifth Mixer Plan (May 7–12, 1963)
Fifth Mixer Plan was the three person exhibition that led to the founding of the group, and was staged in May 1963 at the Dai-Ichi Gallery in Shinjunku. The three artists presented some of their seminal individual works; Takamatsu exhibited String Continue On and On and Akasegawa exhibited Wrapped Objects.
Sixth Mixer Plan (May 28–29, 1963)