was a Japanese artist who worked across mediums including paintings, drawings, and performances. Best known as one of the few female members in the short-lived art collective Neo-Dada Organizers, Kishimoto investigated female identity and the definition of a female avant-garde artist through destruction-oriented practices in the 1960s. Beginning in the 1970s, Kishimoto's interests shifted toward examining and questioning the political power structure of Japanese society as well as that of the U.S.-Japan relations, and she briefly adopted the style of Pop Art. Later on, she expanded the scope of her artistic inquiry and began to invent a worldview of her own. Kishimoto envisioned a society in which everyone would strive to reach the bottom of a hierarchy instead of the top as in real life. Kishimoto translated her utopian view onto several canvases in the 80s, where motifs of animals and expressive strokes constituted modern allegories. While combatting cancer on the sickbed during the last few years of her life, Kishimoto continued to probe the personal and the political through expressive works on paper as well as performances.
Biography Early life On October 1, 1939, Kishimoto was born as the third child and second daughter to Kishimoto Ken’ichi and Natsuko. Her father was a psychiatrist, and her mother Natsuko (b. 1906) had briefly pursued a career as a painter. In 1946, Kishimoto attended the Nagoya Municipal Yagoto Elementary School (Nagoya Shiritsu Yagoto Shōgakkō) and in 1952, the Nanzan Middle School where she joined the art club. Against her parents' wishes of going to a medical college, Natsuko had moved to Kyoto and studied painting, before moving back to Nagoya to get married. The encouragement of her mother Natsuko, who was unable to sustain her dream of becoming a painter, played an important role in the start of Kishimoto's artistic career.
Kishimoto then studied in the Art Department of the Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka Senior High School. Graduates from the same program included Genpei Akasegawa, Shūsaku Arakawa, and Iwata Shin’ichi (member of Zero Jigen group), who were two years ahead of Kishimoto. After graduation in 1958, Kishimoto had first aimed for the Tokyo University of the Arts where she could study Western oil painting. However, Kishimoto's father was reportedly overwhelmed by the vast amount of oil paintings in museums when he traveled to Europe for an academic conference. Therefore, taking on her father's advice of switching to Japanese painting, the young artist changed course right before the university entrance exam and subsequently failed it. Kishimoto studied for another year but her second attempt to gain admission to the Tokyo University of the Arts once again fell through. Instead, Kishimoto enrolled at Tama Art University to study Japanese painting in April 1959. This experience filled with stress and failure might have caused bipolar disorder for the artist. An interview with the artist's sister Yoshiko Iida unveiled the family's concern for Kishimoto later on. Iida said, “If Sayako had succeeded to enter the Tokyo University of the Arts, she would have followed the path of a proper artist. Since she became awakened to the avant-garde in Tama Art University, it was probably the turning point in her life. All the family members were tossed around by her behaviors.”
1960 - Neo-Dada Organizers At Tama Art University, Kishimoto became acquainted with the idea of avant-garde. After seeing an exhibition of the Neo-Dada Organizers at the end of her freshman year, Kishimoto joined the group in 1960. During Neo-Dada's short, half-year lifespan, Kishimoto was one of the only female members in a group led by male members including Ushio Shinohara and Masunobu Yoshimura. Aiming to dismantle existing conventions in art, Neo-Dada artists presented shockingly destructive performances and employed mass media to expose their works and themselves. Kishimoto was persuaded to become involved in events directed by other male artists with the goal of attracting media attention. In an advertising event for the group, titled Beach Show for TBS television in July 1960, Kishimoto was bandaged up, hung in the air on a tree, and had fireworks lit beneath her on the Zaimokuza Beach in Kamakura. The male artists also threw dirt and ashes on her. Art historian Mayumi Kagawa argues that Kishimoto's position was “tenuous” and the artist was “easily reversed from the subject of action to the object of male sadism.” cited in Yoshimoto, 2005, 28. While Kishimoto's presence in the group was a bold, boundary-breaking move for a female artist at the time, she was not regarded as an equal by her male peers. Kishimoto's presence resembled that of a mascot and provided a female form for the group to experiment with. Although Kishimoto had participated in at least two of Neo-Dada's exhibitions, none of her works from this period survive, and even her fellow artists could not remember any of her works.
1960s - After Neo-Dada Between 1959 and 1979, Kishimoto worked primarily in Tokyo. Kishimoto exhibited in the 12th to 15th Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibitions from 1960 to 1963, and had her first solo show at Naiqua Gallery in 1964. After the dissolution of Neo-Dada, Kishimoto remained within the circle of this group of artists and continued to produce works that shared their ideology. In 1966, at her solo exhibition Narusisu no bohyō [The Gravestones of Narcissus] at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Tokyo, Kishimoto presented a multimedia installation that announced her stance on the female identity. In the center of the one-room gallery sat a gigantic plaster skull, behind which were two gravestones with a silhouette of a baby falling into the grave. On the surrounding walls were posed lifesize plaster figures of males and females in uncanny postures. The figure on the back wall, in particular, appeared to be dissolving. By exposing and manipulating bodily forms as well as establishing the resonance between birth and death, The Gravestones of Narcissus revealed Kishimoto's rejection of the feminine body. The idea of male dominance in art had shaped Kishimoto's projected image then of how a real avant-garde artist should behave. Only by denying her feminine side would she be recognized by her male-majority fellows as a professional. The works in this as well as a previous exhibition, The Medal of Narcis (1965), were burned on the banks of the Tama River after the exhibitions closed.
While attempting to overcome their male-centered logic, Kishimoto retained the destructive aspects of the Neo-Dada Organizers as a guiding proposition. Her first solo exhibition in her hometown Nagoya was at Sakura Gallery, titled Look Left!!. Kishimoto, in front of many visitors as well as former Neo-Dada colleagues such as Ushio Shinohara, Nobuaki Kojima, and Tomio Miki, destroyed her works by spraying white house paint over them. She also covered herself with paint and eventually cut her hair. Yoshimoto wrote that this event took place during the opening reception of the exhibition while the image description in Japanese Women Artists indicates that it occurred on the last day. Recalling her practices in the 60s, Kishimoto later wrote, “I believed that ART could not serve its original role and function as the releasing machine to uplift the mind of the viewer unless I completely broke with my narcissism as a woman and a human being. Those works were the very result of my desperate act of self-annihilation at age twenty-six.” cited in Yoshimoto, 2006, 29. In 1968, at her solo exhibition Romantic Structure at the Ginhodo Gallery in Ginza, Kishimoto covered the walls and ceiling of the space with large-scale drawings of flower petals. From this exhibition until the end of 70s, Kishimoto temporarily renamed herself Mari Kishimoto. Despite being in the midst of the avant-garde scene, around 1969, Kishimoto took a break from her performance-based activities in Tokyo. Reportedly she ran several planning companies and got married in 1973 before divorcing in four years.
1970s - Pop Art Although having retreated from under the spotlight, Kishimoto continued to create works, mostly paintings and drawings, adopted a Pop art style while engaging with broad political issues that emerged in Japanese society then. So far, two paintings of this kind have been identified. In one of them, Title Unknown (Spit out Blood, The Showa Genroku, Oppekepe...) (ca. early 1970s) Kishimoto manifested cynicism towards the U.S.-Japan relationship by collaging a dozen of popular motifs. The artist depicted two Japanese male figures — on the left Otojirō Kawakami, a Meiji performing artist known for his Oppekepe songs criticizing the wealth gap in Japanese society, and on the right, Yukio Mishima, the famous literary figure who committed suicide in 1970 as a ritual act to object the Japanese government. Between the two figures was a line of text in red — “Crying While Spitting Blood," signaling the two painted figures' frustration toward society, which might echo Kishimoto's feelings as well. Near the bottom, one can see a cheetah violently biting a seal, against the background of seemingly erupting Mt. Fuji. On the far right is a small portrait of Yoko Ono and John Lennon, and above that is a bow tied with Japanese and American flags placed in front of the Japanese Diet. The two motifs of Ono-Lennon marriage and the tied bow resonate with each other and point to the Japanese-U.S. relationship, specifically the renewal of the Japanese-U.S. Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1970, which many students had protested.
In January 1976, Kishimoto participated in "Artists Union Symposium '76" and in July, exhibited her work Rain at the Women Filmmaker's Festival. In May 1979, Kishimoto had an operation to treat breast cancer and since then officially moved back to Nagoya. Since then, she had continued to work on her own while combating both manic-depressive illness and breast cancer.
1980s - Utopian Vision Kishimoto's practice in the 80s centered on her reflection on and critique of the power hegemony, both in the realm of gender as well as that between nations, species, and beyond. The artist believed that the human society at large had been shaped into a pyramidal structure, in which one was compelled to dominate, conquer, and overtake others in order to move up. She asserted,
“The System will change as our perspective changes. I believe this inverted triangle structure which presents a downward competition, not an uprising one, in other words a structure where we accept others’ blazes and support one another without drawing attention, will be political landscape of the 80s and 21st century. Politics in the 80s should be built upon a vision where people make their policy initiatives based on objectives to foster world peace.” cited in Daisuke Murata,“Another Story: Selected Works from the Collection, June 3, 2005-October 16, 2005,” Я[á:r], 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, issue 04 / 2007, 94. https://www.kanazawa21.jp/tmpImages/videoFiles/file-52-4-e-file-17.pdf