Atsuko Tanaka (1932–2005) produced abstract paintings, drawings, performances and installations that often incorporated the mass-produced domestic materials that were ubiquitous during the postwar economic boom in Japan. Tanaka also often used her own body as a part of her performance pieces, and the gestural lines, circular shapes and bright colours of her later paintings recall not only the intricate electrical connections of circuit boards, but also diagrams of the body’s complex nervous system. Tanaka joined the Gutai group in 1955, a year after it was founded as the first major avant-garde artistic group in postwar Japan. Atsuko remained a member of the group until 1965 and participated in its numerous exhibitions, multimedia events, performances and theatrical programs during that time. Her work was included in the First Gutai Art Exhibition at Ohara Kaikan Hall in Tokyo (1955), and for the Second Gutai Art Exhibition (1956) she premiered perhaps one of her most well-known works, Electric Dress (1956). Her final exhibition as a member of the group was the Fifteenth Gutai Art Exhibition (1965). Tanaka’s first solo exhibition was presented at the Minami Gallery, Tokyo (1963), and more recent exhibitions include Electrifying Art, Grey Art Gallery, New York, in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (2004–5); and Atsuko Tanaka: Paintings and Drawings, 1980–2002, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2004). Her work was the subject of a major survey exhibition, Atsuko Tanaka: Search for an Unknown Aesthetic, 1954–2000, Ashiya City Museum of Art & History (2001). Her work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions, including Gutai at Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (1999); Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky, Yokohama Museum of Art (1995); Japon des avant gardes, 1910–1970, Centre Pompidou, Paris (1987); and Trends of Contemporary Japanese Art 1, the 1950s: Gloom and Shafts of Light, Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo (1981).

Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).