Matsuzawa Yutaka’s Uncanny Conceptualism: The Occult and Modernity in Transpacific Turn-of-the-Century and Postwar Japan

Despite being a major figure in the birth of conceptualism in Japan alongside Yoko Ono and On Kawara, Matsuzawa Yutaka’s name has largely been overlooked in the English-speaking world’s art historical canon. Particularly marked by his unique interests in prehistoric animistic religion, the occult, Esoteric Buddhism, and quantum physics, Matsuzawa’s practice allows us to contend with how in the wake of wars, transnational exchanges, new technologies, and societal shifts toward capitalist economies, specters of pre-industrial worldviews and ideologies linger. Matsuzawa’s work insists on the recognition of these continued engagements with the premodern, the supernatural, and the unexplainable. Furthermore, contending with Matsuzawa’s biography reveals the ways in which explorations of alternative epistemologies since the turn of the century were crucially configured transpacifically. To consider these intersections seriously in Matsuzawa’s work offers key interventions on dominant narratives of both conceptualism and modernity in Japan and across the Pacific, crucially allowing alternative genealogies of art history to emerge.