Go Hirasawa (Hereafter “H”): First, can you talk about how your current exhibition came to be realized?

Yoshihiro Kato (Hereafter “K”): I returned to Japan three years ago. When I went to see exhibitions or galleries in Ginza, I thought the Japanese art world looked isolated from world currents. Meanwhile, when I turned to thinking of the city as receptacle, it seemed futuristic, such as Shibuya. It made me feel that it is only the Japanese who don’t believe the world is coming to an end, and they are living in a shiny, futuristic city, as a container, though the inside of their brain is soaking in a muddy ditch. From a bunch of young people with dyed hair hanging out in Shibuya to painters in Ginza, they all looked the same. Thirty years ago, I organized “Crash World Expo ’70 Joint Struggle Council” and tried to destroy the Expo. The theme of Expo ’70 was “human progress and harmony.” We drove in a wedge of “No!” to the Japanese people who willingly tried to become westerners, when people in other Asian countries and Africa were assimilated into western colonialism. We were called, “angura” or underground at that time, because we were working underground with a revolutionary theory as an antithesis to Expo and the idea of modernity. First, there was student upheaval in France. In China some accumulated frustration of the Red Guards exploded. In Japan people countered modernity in a classical way: they picked up rocks from the railroad tracks of the Yamanote Line and threw them at the Riot Police. And we, Zero Jigen [Zero Dimesion] Group got naked, wielding dicks and pussies, and declared the manifesto for “Crash World Expo ’70 Joint Struggle Council.”

H: The women with penises running naked in your paintings in your current exhibition and the struggle against the Expo ’70 expressed in the film, “White Hare of Inaba,” which was screened recently after a long time, are extremely significant, considering the situation that the notion of ‘body’ has been lost from the cities in Japan’s highly developed consumer society. You began your happenings in 1960. In that year, the U.S Japan Security Treaty issue arose. Were your ‘happenings’ born out of political conscious in the midst of the situation?

K: You know, those who were not leftist at that time were stupid. (Laughs) Saying it in extreme, being a leftist was equal to being an artist. The logic to confront modernity came from the philosophy of Marx, and for this struggle, some people dared to fight with bombs, while others, knowing that they would be killed, dared to thrust bamboo spears at their enemies. I was a cultural terrorist, so I got naked. To strip bare the heart of modern society, artists themselves plunged into it naked. Unlike ordinary artists, we were logical, even though we appeared to be the least logical.

H: I agree. At first glance your happenings seem to fit into a simple scheme of being anti-modern/nakedness/underground to counter the notion of the modern, but if we look at your series of happenings called “Ceremony,” they were political. In this sense, when we have an overview of the conceptual or political art of the period, your projects with Zero Jigen came to be seen more complex. In those days you conceived those events as an expression of one-time-ness that could not be reduced to ‘city/modern/art,’ the inevitable derivative of the feeling of stagnation in the situation. By creating various interactions, including with the audience, they developed into other genres.

K: After the manifesto of Crash Expo Joint Struggle Council, we lost almost all connections with painters. In Yomiuri Independent, the actions of artists’ friends, who were still working in the same field as our comrades, ended up becoming a mainstream entertainment that was called, “Happenings,” while we formed our assault from outside the art community, just like native American Indians. They looked at our events and declared that “they were no longer art.” That’s how I came to realize that the notion of avant-garde was the same as “the progress and development” proposed by the World Expo.

H: Osaka Expo ‘70 has the historical significance of being an anthology of the decade, in which the avant-garde and experimental art of the era was assimilated into capital. You countered it with the anti-Expo action. In politics, the lynching by the United Red Army took place in ’72, and subsequently we rushed into the time of factional violence. Meanwhile, Adachi went to Palestine, and other artists either left Japan or drifted into religion and spiritualism. Including some specific situation of stagnation, as well as the pressures of the state power such as the security police, can you talk about the details of how you decided to go to India?

K: The important thing is that until Expo ’70, everyone was the same as being avant-garde artists. But we were the only ones who began to reject the avant-garde, so there was no base for us in Japan. In addition, talented underground filmmakers such as Masanori Oe and Rikuro Miyai went to India, and became involved in religious cults. They all experienced the ‘spiritual’ through taking drugs, but ironically they sought the actual place that promised the existence of the spirit.
      Now, the problem was, where else can we fly? I believe that art can be an act that ventures to postulate something called an imaginary spiritual world. I want to propose what I call ‘Asiantalism’ as a criterion for the imaginary spiritual world in order to overthrow our view for looking at the West. We have the tantra of the womb world, the philosophy of Garbhadhatu and also Taoism, which marked the beginning of the ‘drop-out’ philosophy. Revolving around these two main philosophies, I would like to revive the imaginary spiritual world called the ‘East,” and I want everyone to be armed with these theories in order to make a critique of the Modern West the basis of our expression.

H: I think, you are clearly using “Asiantalism” as something very different from the nationalistic idea of Asianism, but at the same time it may be a risky term that suggests a dichotomous framework, which could essentialize the West as the premise.

K: No, it will be more dangerous if I don’t clarify the dichotomy. I don’t mean to claim: “Asia as one” like Tenshin Okakura. Rather, I would claim: “Asia is polytheistic.” If the Arab world has a monotheistic identity with the West, which makes progress toward the modern, our root is the polytheism that originated in India. While “Orientalism” means the exoticism as seen from the West, what I mean by ‘Asiantalism’ has an image of the Viet Cong. Like them, we strive for the advent of artists who continuously destroy the modern…by digging holes, because it is connected to the idea of angura [underground]. (Laughs) Yet it is finally the image of Asia as a logic within us, who have already become Westerners; so obviously it doesn’t mean a simple return to the East, hoping that happiness will come if we destroy the West.

H: Now there is a resurgence of nostalgia about the Expo in Japan, exemplified by the reassessment of Taro Okamoto. At that time, Okamoto quibbled over the Expo, saying that “Tower of the Sun” is the best manifestation of the anti-Expo,” and young critics positively accepted his remark. In contrast, there is another image of the anti-Expo, as represented by you and Zero Jigen, who claimed that’s a lie. And today, there is a trend of collapsing Expo and the anti-Expo into one, oblivious to the anti-Expo’s watershed battle against capital; there is danger of treating Expo and anit-Expo as two sides of the same coin.

K: I myself think that Taro and I were two sides of the same coin. During the final stage of the anti-Expo struggle, since there were no law to prosecute against drugs, I had a hallucinatory experience: after returning to a normal state, I realized that I who had thought that the next world would open up after defeating those guys were just fighting on the modernity, the same battlefield as theirs. Inasmuch as the battle was an emergent one without a way of criticizing and revision from a distance, I have to accept that we were part of the same clique.

H: In those days what did you think about Okamoto’s “Tower of the Sun”?

K: The very fact that he was there was our primary motive to organize “Crash Expo Faction.” Taro was my teacher, and his philosophy as an avant-garde was to persistently resist the modern. But “Tower of the Sun” was neither art nor some criticism that affirmed or denied the modern. It seemed like a dumb-faced kokeshi doll. So we thought it necessary to awaken him, and we rushed into the Expo. His earlier works and “Tower of the Sun” were totally disconnected in my mind. Furthermore, just as the main statue of the Expo was a stupor, the people like Shoko Asahara of Aum, those who talk about soul and spiritual world, are outwardly running a modern science factory, but inwardly making ugly hierarchical structure, practicing factional violence, and committing murder. While embellishing itself with the super-modern, Expo ’70 placed Taro the stupid in the middle of the stage. Expo ’70, which couldn’t gather all those extravagant modern stuff without nullifying artists, and Asahara’s Aum Sect are connected in my opinion.

H: That’s a new interpretation.

K: Since today’s Tokyo is perpetuated by keeping the people inside the city in stupor, it is the same as the Expo. Although we have to refuse dangling things around, and propose a different way of life, an alternative thought, what exists is nothing but equivocal art full of excuses, without a hint of a philosophy. “Asiantalism” is what I would like to propose as a response in an extremely straightforward but gaudy manner.

H: Inspired by “Asia,” you move beyond it to attain a new universality. I wish you the best in your attempt at that in this exhibition.

END