Tetsumi Kudo was a key figure in Tokyo’s radical art scene in the late 1950s. Japan’s traumatic wartime experiences due to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the aftermath, served as the motivation for his confrontational sculptures, installations and performances. In 1962, the artist moved to Paris, where he lived and worked for twenty-five years before returning to Tokyo in the 1980s. His work became less provocative, but a critical contemplation of the relationship between nature, humankind and ideology in the post-war society remained an important theme.
