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Lot Essay
"What is, Or is Not, Art?"
A key member of the 1960s Japanese Anti-Art movement, Genpei Akasegawa was part of the Neo-Dada and cofounded the Hi-Red Center. Most notably, in 1963, Akasegawa printed a series of one-sided thousand-yen bill replicas to be used as gallery invitations to his solo exhibition in Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery. Through his replica notes, Akasegawa displaced art from the usual confine of the exhibition space and integrated it into the everyday life. As a result of his simulacrum of the thousand-yen bill, Akasegawa was convicted for currency imitation in 1967. Undeterred by his verdict, Akasegawa impishly went on and produced The Greatest Japanese Zero Yen Note (Lot 527), which he sold for three hundred yen. Since the Zero-Yen notes did not contain any value, it was completely legal and thus marked the ingenuity of Akasegawa's act of defiance.
After the Thousand–Yen Bill Incident, although Akasegawa stopped print production, he continued hi s artistic enthusiasm as a novelist. As suggested by Neo-dada's philosophy, arts are not meant to be a permanent possession. Instead, they ought to be destroyed immediately after creation. This concept renders Akasegawa's works rare - only a few remain today. To preserve and document Akasegawa's work, the Sano Gallery had commissioned the artist to reproduce his Wrapped Bonsai (Lot 528) in 1996, which had been destroyed after its creation earlier in 1963. Like many of his artworks, Akasegawa's Wrapped Bonsai is surrounded with an everyday object - in this case, white bandages and gauzes that cover the bonsai. By packaging his artwork with the quotidian, Akasegawa infiltrated the everyday life with his unique approach on the nature of art and challenged the meaning of art.
A key member of the 1960s Japanese Anti-Art movement, Genpei Akasegawa was part of the Neo-Dada and cofounded the Hi-Red Center. Most notably, in 1963, Akasegawa printed a series of one-sided thousand-yen bill replicas to be used as gallery invitations to his solo exhibition in Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery. Through his replica notes, Akasegawa displaced art from the usual confine of the exhibition space and integrated it into the everyday life. As a result of his simulacrum of the thousand-yen bill, Akasegawa was convicted for currency imitation in 1967. Undeterred by his verdict, Akasegawa impishly went on and produced The Greatest Japanese Zero Yen Note (Lot 527), which he sold for three hundred yen. Since the Zero-Yen notes did not contain any value, it was completely legal and thus marked the ingenuity of Akasegawa's act of defiance.
After the Thousand–Yen Bill Incident, although Akasegawa stopped print production, he continued hi s artistic enthusiasm as a novelist. As suggested by Neo-dada's philosophy, arts are not meant to be a permanent possession. Instead, they ought to be destroyed immediately after creation. This concept renders Akasegawa's works rare - only a few remain today. To preserve and document Akasegawa's work, the Sano Gallery had commissioned the artist to reproduce his Wrapped Bonsai (Lot 528) in 1996, which had been destroyed after its creation earlier in 1963. Like many of his artworks, Akasegawa's Wrapped Bonsai is surrounded with an everyday object - in this case, white bandages and gauzes that cover the bonsai. By packaging his artwork with the quotidian, Akasegawa infiltrated the everyday life with his unique approach on the nature of art and challenged the meaning of art.