was a center for contemporary art in Southeast Portland, Oregon. It was led by a desire to support artists, propose new modes of production, and stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art. This website serves as an archive of Yale Union’s programming from 2011 through 2021.

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YUTAKA MATSUZAWA

EX

June 30–August 18, 2019
Thursday–Sunday, 12–6pm

Opening June 29, 5–7pm

Curated by Alan Longino and Reiko Tomii

Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922–2006) was considered the father of Japanese conceptual art. Born in Shimo Suwa in central Japan, he studied architecture during the war, and upon witnessing the after effects of the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, he proclaimed upon his graduation from school that he wished “to create an architecture of invisibility.” Once he gave up architecture, he wrote poetry, made paintings, and worked as both an artist and teacher in his hometown. In his pursuit of ways to express the invisible invisibly, Matsuzawa began to develop a unique understanding of conceptual art that both elevated and transcended the typical notions of conceptual art in the western, euro-centric art worlds. However, exhibitions and publications for Matsuzawa in the West have only occurred infrequently, and to this day his work has still not been given the same space for consideration and understanding that many others situated in the West have thus received.

In light of this history, the exhibition at Yale Union will be the first in the U.S. for the artist, and alongside the exhibition the artist’s seminal publication, Quantum Art Manifesto, from 1988, will be re-published for the first time outside of Japan in an edition of 500. During the exhibition, art historian Namiko Kunimoto will speak on the collaborative work between Yutaka Matsuzawa and the female Butoh dancer, Tsujimura Kazuko.

Alan Longino is an art historian and curator based in Cologne, Germany. His M.A. thesis in Art History from CUNY Hunter College (2017) focused on the event of telepathy within information as the source of image production. His writing has appeared in the Haunt Journal of Art, from UC Irvine.

Reiko Tomii is a New York-based scholar and curator who investigates post-1945 Japanese art as a vital element of world art history of modernisms. She organized exhibitions with Yutaka Matsuzawa until his death in 2006. Her book Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan was published by MIT Press and won the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. The book has recently been turned into an exhibition Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s, currently on view at Japan Society Gallery in New York (through June 9), in which Matsuzawa is prominently featured.

What is Psi?

What is ?

, or Psi, is the calling card of Yutaka Matsuzawa, the Japanese artist who devised a unique immaterial strain of conceptualism in the 1960s.

Read プサイ (Pusai) in Japanese, Matsuzawa borrowed the idea of Psi from “psi powers,” or “cognitive abilities beyond the five senses such as precognition and clairvoyance,” as understood in parapsychology, with which he had become familiar during his research stay in New York in 1956–57. Upon his return home, Matsuzawa began to formulate a theory and practice of Psi as part of his lifelong search for ways to express the invisible invisibly. He produced hundreds of Psi objects and collages, through which he intended to activate the viewer’s mental faculties, many of them being placed in the so-called Psi Zashiki Room in his home in central Japan.

By 1963, Matsuzawa added another layer of meaning to his theory of Psi: the ψ function, a key element of quantum physics that represents the wave function and figures prominently in the works of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. In his body of Psi works, the Greek character ψ for the first time appeared in his 1963 work, On Another Work in Another Container, or On Cutting. In this work, which would reappear in his 1988 Quantum Art Manifesto, ψ is followed by its Japanese reading in katakana プサイ, signaling the advancement in his theoretical formulation.

On June 1, 1964, the artist had a fateful subliminal experience: While half-awake in his bed, he heard a voice commanding “Vanish matter!” He felt compelled to put his beloved Psi to death, because by then his Psi works were so closely tied to materialism, manifesting in the form of collage and assemblage. Not only did he decide to use text alone in his work, printed or written on paper support from then onward, he also devised the concept of Non-Sensory Painting, a new form of painting that exists invisibly but surely, just like anti-matter or a universe with negative curvature do. The first publicly presented work after his Revelation, Psi Corpse at once announces the death of Psi and the birth of Non-Sensory Painting.

However, Psi was too important for him to keep in the coffin. He quickly resurrected it and subsequently remodeled it with a simpler definition: “human psyche.”

Reiko Tomii

The curators wish to thank the Matsuzawa family—Kumiko, Yoko, and Haruo—for their support and guidance for this project. Special thanks is extended to Gary Robbins and Hope Svenson for their focus and diligence with the publication and exhibition organization. Equally, thanks is given to Jeff Rothstein, Rachel Valinsky, Nebahat Avcioglu, Louwrien Wijers, Paul Goede, Yoshiko Shimada, Misa Shin, Daniel Kiss, Jan Kaps, Rodney & Taka Nonaka-Hill, Namiko Kunimoto, and Matt Jay.

EXHIBITION PAMPHLET

PSI CORPSE TRANSLATION

#1. Installation view
#2. The Nine Meditation Chamber, 1977, detail.
#3. Installation view
#4. Installation view
#5. Psi Corpse, 1964/1995.
#6. Installation view
#7. My Own Death, 1970.
#8. Installation view
#9. Installation view

All works from the collection of Kumiko Matsuzawa.

Photos by Leif Anderson