Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan

In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese women artists briefly rose to prominence within the avant-garde, their work shaped by the influx of the abstraction-heavy Art Informel movement from Europe. Yet as ‘action painting’ in the style of Jackson Pollock, with its emphasis on bold gestures and physical force, gained ground, women’s contributions were increasingly sidelined. The notion of ‘action’ was closely aligned with masculinity, reinforcing traditional gender hierarchies and leaving many female painters absent from critical discourse.

This winter exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo seeks to reframe this narrative. On show from December 16 to February 8 2026, ‘Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan’ revisits a pivotal yet overlooked chapter of Japanese art history.

Inspired by Izumi Nakajima’s acclaimed study Anti-Action: Post-War Japanese Art and Women Artists (2019), the exhibition highlights alternative strategies of creation that challenged the dominant ethos of their time. It features approximately 120 works by figures such as Yayoi Kusama, Atsuko Tanaka, Hideko Fukushima and Aiko Miyawaki, alongside lesser-known contemporaries. 

Through rare and unpublished works, immersive large-scale installations and fresh scholarly perspectives, ‘Anti-Action’ reveals how these artists redefined the possibilities of art beyond the parameters of physical action, and how their legacies continue to resonate today.