23 Facts About Genpei Akasegawa

Katsuhiko Akasegawa, known by his pseudonym Genpei Akasegawa, was a Japanese artist and writer.

Genpei Akasegawa used another pseudonym, Katsuhiko Otsuji, for literary works.

Genpei Akasegawa has had retrospective exhibitions at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Chiba City Museum, and Oita City Museum.

Genpei Akasegawa's work is in the permanent collection at Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Genpei Akasegawa was born in 1937, in Yokohama, and moved to Ashiya, Oita and Nagoya during his childhood because of his father's job.

In 1956 and 1957, Genpei Akasegawa submitted artworks to the Nihon Independant exhibition.

Genpei Akasegawa has recalled that toward the end of the 1950s a competition emerged among artists showing at the Yomiuri Independant to see whose painting could extend furthest from its surface.

The members included, along with Genpei Akasegawa, artists acquainted through the Yomiuri Independant such as Ushio Shinohara, Sho Kazakura, Kinpei Masuzawa, and Shusaku Arakawa.

Around this time Genpei Akasegawa made his Sheets of Vagina.

In 1963, Genpei Akasegawa formed the art collective Hi-Red Center with Jiro Takamatsu and Natsuyuki Nakanishi.

For Genpei Akasegawa these canned universe pieces were necessarily part of a set.

In May 1963, Genpei Akasegawa sent out invitations to The Fifth Mixer Plan, Hi-Red Center's first gallery exhibition at Dai-Ichi Gallery in Tokyo.

Genpei Akasegawa's note was first discovered by the Japanese authorities during a raid on the houses of members of the radical leftist group Hanzaisha Domei.

Genpei Akasegawa was indicted for creating imitations of banknotes, in violation of the 1895 Law to Regulate the Imitation of Currency and Bond Certificates.

Genpei Akasegawa treated the entire incident as a work of performance art or a happening, and spoke of it as he would speak of his physical artworks, dubbing it the Model Thousand-Yen Note Incident.

Genpei Akasegawa recorded his thoughts and experiences as the trials were proceeding in a series of essays published in 1970 in the collection titled Obuje o motta musansha.

In June 1967, Genpei Akasegawa was found guilty and given a lenient three-month suspended sentence.

Genpei Akasegawa appealed twice but exhausted his final appeal when the Supreme Court of Japan ruled against him in 1970.

In 1970 Genpei Akasegawa was appointed to teach at the Bigakko art school.

Genpei Akasegawa was fond of old cameras, especially Leicas, and from 1992 to around 2009, he joined Yutaka Takanashi and Yutokutaishi Akiyama in the photographers' group Raika Domei, which held numerous exhibitions.

Genpei Akasegawa is perhaps best known by the general public for his 1998 book Rojin Ryoku, which was a bestseller in Japan.

Genpei Akasegawa produced manga, most notably The Sakura Illustrated in the 70s.

Genpei Akasegawa died on October 26,2014, in Tokyo, aged 77.