¡°Outsider art¡± is relatively new in Japan and, as a genre, works made by self-taught Japanese artists are still not very well known on the category-delineating, label-loving international art scene.
Now, though, ¡°Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan,¡± an exhibition on view (through June 30) at the Wellcome Collection in London, is calling attention to the innovative creations of dozens of talented, self-taught artists from a country that has long been recognized for its rich history in the fields of design and the visual arts.
Taking its title from a Japanese word that can mean either ¡°creation¡± or ¡°imagination,¡± depending on which kanji are used to write it, ¡°Souzou¡± presents more than 300 works made by 46 artists, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, textiles and ceramics. Representing a diverse range of art-making motivations, techniques and themes, it features such unusual confections as Shota Katsube¡¯s legions of miniature action figures fashioned from plastic-bag twist ties and Norimitsu Kokubo¡¯s drawings of imaginary cityscapes, made with colored pencils and inks on enormous sheets of paper ¡ª one is several meters wide.
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