Ay-O

In 1958 he moved to New York as a way to distance himself from Japanese culture and immerse himself in the Western contemporary art scene.  In 1961 he was introduced to George Maciunas (1931-1978), the founder of the anti-art movement Fluxus (see Fluxus below), by Yoko Ono (b. 1933) and he was to go on to create hundreds of works under the Fluxus banner - works that went "beyond the confines of the painting" and "appealed to the five senses,"1 notably his "finger boxes" and his pioneering installations which he dubbed "environments." 

In a 2012 interview with art journalist C. B. Liddell, the artist recalled his first years in New York.

I took my art to around 150 galleries twice a year for three years.  I couldn't sell my art, but I became famous as a very funny Japanese Beatnik artist, so people would invite me every night to parties. I didn't need to (buy anything to) eat myself. But I was not happy. I was always fighting with the New York School people because they would always say art is (having) 'guts.' I would say that this kind of guts is what killed Pollock when his car crashed.

He goes on to recall how despite disliking abstract expressionism and "action painting", he was forced to create just this type of work to earn money.

Encountering Western artists who admired many aspects of Japanese culture such as Zen, Ay-O began to re-examine his own attitudes. He credits John Cage's Zen-inspired 1952 silent composition "4'33" with bringing about a new appreciation for the culture of his homeland.  "I suddenly understood everything, and I hated my previous self and became a student of Zen - from America."

"Inspired by Cage's anti-composition, Ay-O started to search for ways to be an artist creating anti-art. In 1964, he stumbled upon the style that would come to define him. Instead of worrying about the choice of motifs and colors, he decided to use all the colors of the spectrum equally and use motifs that came to him through a wide variety of media."

I covered the wall with dark canvas, then I painted a color, one color for each day. I did this because I hated painting and was against painting, but I liked to make things, so just a wall was OK. I thought I must use all the colors. If I start painting a visual work it has to have all the colors, I decided.

Representing Japan at the 1966 Venice Biennale, his signature rainbow style gained him international recognition and fame.  In 1968-1969 he taught at the University of Kentucky, a stint that may have inspired his highly praised 1971 ten print portfolio Nashville Skyline, a rainbow adaptation of motifs from American folk art. The portfolio is dedicated to Bob Dylan. 

Ay-O returned to Japan following his teaching assignment and in 1970 he constructed his famous Tactile Rainbow Room for the Osaka World Fair, "Expo '70."   In 1971 he represented Japan at the São Paulo Biennale and he remained in Japan until he left for travels in England, Europe and Nepal in 1973.  The mid to late 1970s were a time of prolific print-making for Ay-O with over 130 prints created during this period. 

Over the last 25 years, Ay-O has kept up his Fluxus related activities.  In 1993 his work was included in the exhibition In the Spirit of Fluxus organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis which traveled to five other museums.  In 1994 his solo exhibition Some Hanging Pieces No.9 Object Mandala was held by the Kasseler Kunstverein, Museum Fridericianum Kassel.  In 1998 he co-edited Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, 1931-1978 with Emmett Williams and Ann Noel.  In 2001 he had a major presence in the special exhibit La fluxus Constellation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa. He was also represented in various other Fluxus exhibitions around the world such as Centraal Fluxus Festival Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2003) and Fluxus & Non Fluxus Fluxus Randers Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2006). 

Fluxus 

Conceived by Lithuanian ex-pat artist George Maciunas (1931-1978) in the early 1960s as a response to European domination in art and the commodification of art, Fluxus displayed "a tendency toward the spirit of the collective, toward anonymity and anti-individualism."1  Its 1963 Manifesto called on the artistic vanguard to "purge the world of 'Europanism'!"2

Centered in New York City, where Maciunas landed after fleeing Lithuania at the end of  WWII, it drew inspiration from the composer John Cage who is credited with inspiring the "group's interest in Asian philosophy and aesthetics -  especially Taoism, Zen and the I Ching."3   Fluxus courted Japanese avant-garde artists such as Yoko Ono (b. 1933), Shigeko Kubota (b. 1937), Chieko Shiomi (b. 1938) and Ay-O "as a collective manifestation of an Eastern sensibility that corresponded with such Flux-ideas as chance, minimalism, poetics, and the investigation of the simple and habitual acts of everyday life and their inherent relation to art."4

While Maciunas put forward Fluxus's objectives as "social (not aesthetic)"5 and gave it a left-wing ideological bent, Fluxus was to become an amorphous amalgam of avant-garde artists best summed up in 1990 by Fluxus artists Eric Anderson as "a good gathering of a lot of disagreement from many good individuals" and by Yoko Ono who stated "Fluxus is what you make of it."6 

Ay-O and Fluxus

A Fluxus member from early on, Ay-O conceived of over 100 works under the Fluxus banner.  Installation art, performance art, poetry and writing were all part of his contribution and all his contributions are imbued with irreverence and humor, as are his "Poem for George Maciunas" and "Rainbow Manifesto" reproduced below.

"Poem for George Maciunas"

O! George

O!! George

O!!! George

-Ay-O7 

1 Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts--Events, Objects, Documents, Benjamin H D Buchloh, et. al. , Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and Columbia University, New York, 1999, p. 9.

2 Japanese Art After 1945: Screen Against the Sky, Alexandra Munroe, Harry N. Abrams, NY, 1994, p. 218.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 op. cit., Kaprow

6 Quotes: Yoko Ono, Paik, Vostell,...Fluxus-Happening-Artists, 1990 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UQFU-Nswro

7 Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, 1931- 1978, ed. Emmett Williams and Ann Noël, Thames and Hudson, 1998, p. 125. 

Ay-O's Prints

"... to forego line and form and put the rainbow to work on the objects around him, transforming them into events."1 

In the late 1950s, the critic and Esperantist Kubo Sadajirō (1909-1996) encouraged Ay-O and Ikeda Shuzo to work in printmaking, and the medium became a significant part of Ay-O's oeuvre2 and, perhaps, the best medium to display his fusing of "color, line, subject mater, and intensity...into a single element."3

Rebelling against the concept of creating works consisting of lines, Ay-O filled his motifs with the colors of the spectrum, from red to violet, giving birth to his ‘rainbow’ works and becoming famous throughout the world as the 'rainbow artist.'4

Before leaving Japan for New York in 1958, Ay-O had already done scores of intaglio prints and lithographs, but he did relatively little print work during his first years in New York.  It was not until 1964 that he made his first "rainbow" lithograph, titled Ready made Rainbow, and it was in 1965, when he was required to submit a silkscreen print to the Japan Art Festival, that he created his first silkscreen, the print-making technique that he is most identified with.

1 Fluxus Friends blog of Alan Bowman http://fluxfriends.blogspot.com/2009/07/ay-o-rainbow-mandala-october-4-to.html

2 Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970, ed. Charles Merewether, Rika Iezumi Hiro, Getty Research Institute, 2007, p. 122

3 Who's Who in Modern Japanese Prints, Frances Blakemore, Weatherhill, 1975, p. 26.

4 Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, "Ay-O: Over the Rainbow Once More" http://www.mot-art-museum.jp/eng/2012/ay_o/ 

5 Ay-O's Rainbow Prints: Catalogue Raisonne, 1954-1979, Sadajiro Kubo, Sohbun-sha, 1979, p. 28.

6 Ibid., p. 32

7 Ibid., p. 34.

last revision:

7/24/2021

3/16/2019

Prints in Collection

click on thumbnail for print details

Prints from the 1974 portfolio

<Then, Mr. Ay-o got drunk by the Rainbow> <Very popular story> <Event for prints>

<Rainbow glass> 

latest revision:

4-26-25 added alt text