From the archives of the Dallas Museum of Art comes the Crow Museum’s newest exhibit, “Groundbreakers: Post-War Japan and Korea.” The exhibit features works by Korean and Japanese artists who played with space, unconventional materials and performance in the wake of World War II, marking the first time in years that many of these pieces see the gallery floor.
Near the entrance of the exhibition lies a closed-off room containing “Counter Ground,” an art piece by contemporary Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima. The piece consists of hundreds of LED numerals cycling up one through nine at different rates, intended to invoke an aerial view of the DFW flatlands. According to Crow Museum curator Natalia Di Pietrantonio, the piece is intended to make the viewer stop and lose themselves in the lights.
“It’s a sequence that’s [intended] to kind of empty your mind,” Di Pietrantonio said. “He believed in a Buddhist philosophy, and so it is about a kind of philosophical encounter where … you don’t see it in a particular sequence in a sense, so you have to kind of really kind of encounter the work and then take a pause and let go of the outside world.”
A major focus of the exhibit were the artistic movements that arose from the ashes of the Second World War in Japan and Korea. The Japanese defeat at the end of the war meant artists were no longer required to produce propaganda for the government, freeing them to pursue their own artistic endeavors. This sudden freedom gave birth to the Gutai movement, an art movement that focused on the interaction between the artist and the viewer.
“Work” by Tsukuro Yamazaki embodies the spirit of Gutai through its distortion of the viewer. The piece is composed of tin left in Japan by American troops splattered with synthetic paint. The finished piece mirrors a kaleidoscopic reflection of the viewer, the corruption of which is intended to incite active observation in the viewer.
In the Japanese post-war reconstruction era, industrialization was slowly reshaping Japanese landscapes into buildings and concrete. Mono-ha was an artistic movement that emerged as a response to post-war modernity exploring the interplay between natural and industrial materials. In “Phase of Nothingness—Cloth and Stone” by Nobuo Sekine, a stone hangs from a rope tied to an extrusion on a cloth canvas. The connection between the synthetic cloth and the natural rock was intended to convey that nature and life exist everywhere, even in man-made environments.
“[Sekine] was a gardener at one point, [and] by the belief system of Shintoism [believed] rocks and earth were living things and didn’t want to feel like [his art] was divorced from that world when he presented it at museums or galleries,” Di Pietrantonio said. “So sometimes we think [of] the museums and galleries as separate spaces [from nature], but he wanted to bring reality and the world into you by using what he called ‘living materials.’”
Japanese movements like Gutai and Mono-ha were incredibly influential in East Asia, with artists from all over the region creating pieces in the new styles. The Japanese origins of the artforms alienated many non-Japanese artists who felt they could never thrive in styles so deeply rooted in a culture they weren’t members of. Out of a desire to produce a truly Korean contemporary artform, Korean artists developed Dansaekhwa, an original movement of monochromatic painting. In “From Point” by Lee Ufan, an eggshell canvas is covered with sets of evenly spaced out blue brushstrokes, with each set fading as the paint on the brush procedurally lessens. Ufan’s intention with the work was to make it appear that the canvas was not containing the world of the painting, but merely reflecting it.
From the emerging focus on the relationship between the artist and the viewer in the Gutai art to the abstract brushstrokes of the Dansaekhwa art, the pieces curated for the exhibit are all the results of the artists being freed from traditional sensibilities and given space to experiment. The differing cultural and creative sensibilities of each artist lead to unique subversions of their traditional artforms — rendering every artstyle and piece distinct.
“Groundbreakers: Post-War Japan and Korea” runs from Sep. 6, 2025 to July 26, 2026 in the Athenaeum. It is a collaboration between UTD and the DMA, with all of the works in the exhibit coming from the DMA’s archive. Tamara Wootton Forsyth, the interim director at the DMA, said that through this collaboration the DMA was hoping to create an environment where students can come and experience art.
“At the heart of the collaboration is a shared belief that art is not only to be seen, but to be experienced,” Forsyth said. “The artists featured in this exhibition challenged traditional ideas, they expanded how the viewer interacts with art and experience works. And in that same spirit, our partnership continues to expand how audiences encounter and understand art, whether it’s here on the campus of UTD, [or] whether it’s at the museum in the Dallas Arts District or out and across our region.”
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