Takako Saito is a Japanese artist closely associated with Fluxus, the international collective of avant-garde artists that was active primarily in the 1960s and 1970s.
19 Facts About Takako Saito
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Takako Saito was deeply involved in the production of Fluxus edition works during the height of their production, and worked closely with George Maciunas.
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Takako Saito is best known for her special chess sets, which include Spice Chess, but her larger body of work focuses on crafting a variety of objects to be used in open-ended situations that create unexpected social relations.
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Takako Saito was born in 1929 in Sabae-Shi, Fukui Province in Japan to a wealthy landholding family.
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Takako Saito's job was to spin threads into rolls, an activity that bears some resemblance to her later artmaking processes.
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In 1947, Takako Saito's mother sent her to Tokyo to study psychology at the Japan Women's University, from which she graduated in 1950.
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Takako Saito then took up a teaching post at a junior high school in 1951 where she remained until 1954.
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Takako Saito moved back to Tokyo in 1961 where she explored artmaking more, but found the rigid hierarchies of the Japanese artists associations and arts institutions difficult to deal with as a self-taught member of Sobi.
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For self-trained Takako Saito, this was an opportunity to learn new production techniques and practice her skills at handcrafts, contributing to her later artistic productions.
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Takako Saito was briefly involved in the communal Fluxus dinners Maciunas hoped to hold as part of the broader communal ideal of Fluxus.
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Takako Saito further expanded her experience through classes at New York University in summer 1964, the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1964 to 1966, and the Art Students League from 1966 to 1968, although these served as justification for her continued visa.
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Takako Saito left New York in 1968, leading an itinerant lifestyle until 1979.
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Takako Saito has contributed pieces to many Fluxus collaborations, including Fluxus 1 and the Flux Cabinet.
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Takako Saito maintained contact with Maciunas throughout the 1970s, up until his death.
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Since 1978, Takako Saito has been living and working in Dusseldorf.
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Takako Saito's move to Dusseldorf and initial housing in the caretaker's workshop of a student hostel directed by Fluxus collector Erik Andersch allowed her to begin working full-time as an artist.
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Daniels notes that while her work is often compared to that of Marcel Duchamp, given Duchamp's focus on the readymade as an escape from labor and his claim for the right to be lazy, Takako Saito comes across as more self-aware of the various forms that labor and craft can take and the relations this investment creates when objects are left available for open exchange.
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Takako Saito is perhaps best known for the various special chess sets she has created over the years.
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Takako Saito associated this craftsmanship with Japanese culture, and when he began working with Saito, he was so impressed with her craftmanship, in spite of her self-taught skills, that he asked her to contribute a series of disrupted chess sets to sell in his new Flux shop on Canal Street in Soho.