Part of the Neo-Dada movement in Tokyo in the early 1960s, Tetsumi Kudo moved in 1962 to Paris, France, where he remained for over twenty years. The Japanese artist, who exhibited at the Venice Biennale in the '70s, died in 1990 at the age of 55. Kudo is currently being rediscovered at the 59th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
The late artist is known for his apocalyptic vision of the future, probably generated by his childhood experiences of World War II, and for his works about the unreasonable demands imposed on nature by human behavior.
In his works Kudo often created interpretations of a new ecology, disturbing and dystopian ecosystems and cultivation environments that comprised artificial plants, transistors electrical cables, cast-resin phalli, isolated limbs and fragments of human bodies that seemed taken from a rotting corpse or from the body of a zombie (check out "Pollution - Cultivation - New Ecology (Portrait of Ionesco)", 1970-71, that featured a rendition of Ionesco's head View this photo). Made with synthetic materials and in fluorescent colours, these works are defined by the artist himself as "visual maquettes" or "models" of our new ecological situation.
The artist used these experimental mixed media dying gardens, growth experiments, rotting dioramas and garish terraria to prompt people to ponder about consumerism, industrialism, pollution and waste and rethink the relationships between nature, humanity and technology.
Transformation is the key theme of this year's biennale and Tetsumi Kudo looked at a rapidly changing world and believed in the "possibility for all of humanity to undergo radical change, or metamorphosis," based on the changing relations between nature and mankind, but also on political balances and on power and value hierarchies between East and West.
Kudo's revival at the Venice Biennale, where his installation "Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule" (1968) is on display, is therefore perfectly timed considering the climate crisis and Russia's threats of a nuclear war.
Incorporating overgrown alien-like flowers in fluorescent shades that glow under UV lights like alien triffids, Kudo's "Garden of the Metamorphosis" is full of dichotomies - it plays indeed around the duality between the poetry of nature and the industrial present, the biological and the artificial. There is also a high tech aura about this work: the colours point at a post-nuclear, post-apocalyptic landscape, one where the human impact on the world has created new flora and fauna that continue to evolve (if you like fluorescent artworks, check also his spray painted and embossed "Fossil in Hiroshima" series View this photo).
Surreal and grotesque, but strikingly relevant, the artist was ahead of his time: in 1971 he wrote, "No matter how, it is important to think about the relationship of polluted nature to the proliferation of electronics…the decomposition of humanity (humanism) and the old and traditional hierarchy of values."
Image credits for this post
Tetsumi Kudo
Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule, 1968
Painted wood, artificial flowers, fabric, black light
350.5 × 350.5 × 350.5 cm
The 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams. Photos by: Roberto Marossi; Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Comments