Genpei Akasegawa

A major figure of Japan’s 1960s avant-garde, Genpei Akasegawa (1937–2014) was a member of the influential artist groups Hi-Red Center and Neo-Dada Organizers. Artist Nam June Paik has described Akasegawa as “one of those unexportable geniuses of Japan.”

In the 1970s, Akasegawa would joke with his students that the mundane phenomenon of urban infrastructural failures and absurdities were Duchampian gestures of conceptual art: a staircase leading to a missing platform, a handrail built for no apparent purpose, or a doorway so high up on a wall as to be completely inaccessible. He called these useless structures “Hyperart Thomasson,” a reference to the American baseball player Gary Thomasson, who was recruited to the Tokyo Giants in 1980 with an exorbitant salary but was rarely able to hit the ball. This delightful joke on conceptual art was profound for acknowledging Duchamp as a similarly mischievous thinker of the metaphysics of modern industrial life, but also for extending the implications of Duchamp’s work beyond its domestication by Western art institutions.

Akasegawa’s “Hyperart Thomasson” celebrated a certain functionless dignity amidst the hilarious pathologies of modern life. Earlier this year, more than 40,000 unpublished prints were discovered by Akasegawa’s family, and the Taipei Biennial 2023 presents a large selection of those photographs for the first time in a public museum, refreshing Akasegawa’s artistic legacy and reminding us of
the power of his observation.