Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan

Anti-Action is a new book describing how artist-women briefly enjoyed prominence in the Japanese avant-garde art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, helped in part by the influx of the Art Informel abstract art movement and its attendant critical vocabulary from Europe.

These same women were, however, patently excluded from critical discourse once Action Painting entered from the United States. This prompted Japan’s male critics to take to the concept of ‘action’ – with its ties to dynamism, strength, and other supposedly masculine qualities – and bring about a renewal of traditional gender hierarchies.

‘Anti-action’ is the key concept in this catalogue and companion volume to an exhibition reexamining the output of Japanese artist-women in those decades. Based on the gender-studies perspectives put forward by art historian and exhibition contributor Nakajima Izumi in Anti-Action (2019), the book presents some 120 works by fourteen artists including Kusama Yayoi, Tanaka Atsuko, and Fukushima Hideko. It contains an  ‘Anti-Action Chronology’, an interview with pioneering feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, and essays on such topics as criticism, materials and gender balance in Japanese art, all of which deepen the exploration and analysis of artist-women’s singular endeavours to counter the dominance of ‘action’ with alternative forms of expression.

Seigensha, 292pp, 25cm × 18cm, illustrated paperback, 2026