From Pop to Fantasy: E’wao Kagoshima’s Formative Years in Japan

In 1976, shortly before his departure to the United States, E’wao Kagoshima mounted a solo exhibition at the Nagai Gallery in the Ginza district, a rarefied neighborhood of luxury commerce and the cultural hub of Tokyo. Little documentation of this exhibition or of the artist’s practice from this period remains today. Only the catalogue, whose production was generously covered by the printing, offers a clue to the scope and style of the young Kagoshima’s oeuvre. The pages contain surreal, dreamy, and symbolic images executed in lithography and oil on paper, wherein human bodies undergo perpetual metamorphosis, their contours dissolving into abstract configurations. Many of the depicted figures exude a strange feeling of motion, as if nothing were fixed but always amorphous. The suite of lithographs titled Noise in the Night (1975–76) exemplifies this aesthetic preoccupation, featuring elongated feminine forms that merge with quotidian objects. Kagoshima’s succinct, delicate, and controlled pen strokes evince the softness and nimbleness of human flesh, underscoring the sense of eroticism and the experience of transfiguration that would come to define his style.

In 1964, when Kagoshima enrolled in the metal casting division at the prestigious Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan was moments away from hosting the Tokyo Summer Olympics.¹ Kagoshima’s student years in art school were colored by the country’s rapid economic success, and the nation’s capital soon grew into an international center of commerce and culture. Determined and hungry to become an artist despite strong opposition from his parents and relatives, Kagoshima devoured new trends in international art by frequenting contemporary art galleries. He was also a voracious reader of English books and magazines. The period witnessed Japan’s cultural landscape becoming saturated by Western, particularly American and British, influences that changed people’s lifestyle aspirations. Pop Art, one of Kagoshima’s early influences, had a particularly strong impact on Tokyo’s emerging contemporary art scene.²

Kagoshima’s first direct encounter with the ascending art movement of Pop came unexpectedly. One day in 1966, he purchased a comprehensive English-language book on Pop from the Jena bookstore in Giza, known for its large selection of foreign publications. Shortly after, he saw an American couple on the street and immediately recognized the man as the artist James Rosenquist, whom he had just seen featured in his recently acquired book. Rosenquist was visiting the city for the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, co-organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Kagoshima plucked up the courage to greet the couple and offered to guide them around the city. Rosenquist was particularly enchanted with a jazz cafe in Shinjuku, where he discovered the popularity of American music in Japan. This remarkable encounter illustrates the unprecedented influx of foreign publications, exhibitions, and artists into the Tokyo art scene during the 1960s, a pivotal moment when transnational artistic dialogue achieved a new level of intimacy.

As many of his Japanese contemporaries had done, Kagoshima quickly internalized and experimented with the formal and stylistic innovation of Pop Art. In 1968, using his metal casting skills, he produced a series of small, cabinet-sized sculptures in which the poured liquid cast in brass upholds common tableware aloft. Titled Stopped Liquid (Spoon) and Stopped Liquid (Cup) (both 1968), the works redeploy mass-produced everyday items with a surrealist touch, appearing to defy gravitational logic. These pieces resonate with a group of Pop artists, including Rosenquist, who orchestrated illogical combinations of consumer products and imageries, stirring our perception of the world. Originally created for his graduation work, these sculptures were met with a positive response when they were displayed in the Mini Shop section at Tokyo Gallery, the leading contemporary art gallery in Japan, along with works by established artists such as Jirō Takamatsu and Miki Tomio.

Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages provided another crucial inspiration, demonstrating to Kagoshima the transformative potential of discarded and commonplace materials. Cornell’s ability to synthesize disparate domains—decorative, scientific, domestic, artistic, natural, filmic, and theatrical—into coherent statements offered a model for transcending traditional artistic categories.³ Cornell’s unclassifiability as an artist proved revelatory for Kagoshima, encouraging him to apply the technical fluency he honed as a custom handbag and jewelry designer—a profession he took up for a brief period to sustain his life—in service of three-dimensional experimentation.

Saints Shoe (1972), featured prominently in the Nagai Gallery catalogue, is a collection of life-size high-heel forms created from leftover design materials combined with unconventional objects such as plastic bananas, miniature trees, and dried mushrooms. Although the black-and-white pages cannot fully convey the work’s visual impact, Kagoshima’s decision to frame these pieces in shadow boxes reflects the cultural context of the period. These works emerged from Japan’s period of unprecedented material prosperity, when younger generations embraced new lifestyle and fashion trends with enthusiasm. High-heeled shoes had become potent symbols of glamor, fetishistic desire, and cultural aspiration. Kagoshima’s fascination with objects designed to enhance bodily appearance paralleled the work of British Pop artist Allen Jones, who was creating works depicting elongated female figures in high heels.⁴ Both artists shared interest in how material conditions, most poignantly expressed through fashion, shape our self-perception of our own physical appearance. The unresolved dialectic between object and body was an important theme for Kagoshima.

During this formative period, Kagoshima also discovered inspiration in the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, founded in 1946 in the Austrian capital. This movement, comprising artists such as Rudolf Hausner, Ernst Fuchs, Helmut Leherb, Wolfgang Hutter, and Anton Lehmden, embraced the technical mastery of the Old Masters and Surrealist imagery.⁵ According to Fuchs, their artistic vision centered on creating dialogues between “the visible and the invisible,” rendering complex human conditions after World War II through psychological, mythical, and spiritual themes. While their strong inclination toward figuration ran counter to the development of postwar abstraction, they nonetheless gained international recognition through fantastical images replete with allegory and symbolism. Above all, imagination reigned supreme, a crucial key to compose compelling representations of life and to “reveal the profound truth hidden within the mundane,” as described by Hausner.

Japan provided fertile ground for the Vienna School to flourish. The concept of gensō (幻想), signifying “fantasy” or “illusion,” had become important in Japanese art criticism for examining the development of Surrealism in Japan, alongside Reportage Painting—a significant 1950s movement that addressed postwar Japan’s social and political condition under the American Occupation through a combination of realism, Surrealism, and folklore. From the early 1960s, Aoki Gallery in Ginza spearheaded the Vienna School’s introduction in the local scene under the guidance of Shūzō Takiguchi, a prominent art critic, poet, artist, and proponent of Surrealism. Art journalism often covered the movement, culminating in the major survey exhibition at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Odakyu Department Store in 1972, which subsequently traveled to two domestic museums. Presenting over one hundred works by Hausner, Fuchs, Hutter, Lehmden, and Erich Brauer, the exhibition reinvigorated the appreciation of manual artistry at a time when such approaches were being overshadowed by the ascendancy of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Kagoshima felt strong affinity with its style and aesthetics, particularly its method for capturing the overflowing outpour of fervid imagination through careful draftsmanship. The kaleidoscopic mise-en-scène pervading the Nagai Gallery catalogue demonstrates the Vienna School’s impact on Kagoshima. However, a crucial distinction is noticeable between the two: whereas the Viennese painters addressed existential questions emerging from wartime trauma, Kagsohima’s works appear more celebratory of the youthful cosmopolitan culture flourishing at the heart of Tokyo.

After spending two years in London in the early 1970s—with a short sojourn in Paris—Kagoshima returned to Tokyo and found an apartment in the Azabu neighborhood, within walking distance of Roppongi’s entertainment district, a popular destination for younger generations and foreign residents. This urban quarter was full of nocturnal energy as crowds poured into the disco venues and “go-go cafes.” His apartment doubled as his studio, where he created many of the works reproduced in the Nagai Gallery catalogue while listening to music by Curtis Mayfield and the British rock band Bad Company.⁶ Musical reference pulsates subtly yet unmistakably throughout this LP-formatted publication, from the languorous, seductive female pianist in Pleasure Seeks Charlotte’s Effect (1975) to other figures that appear to move against a dark background shimmering with light, reminiscent of urban nightclub enclaves. Kagoshima frequently participated in the nightlife scene, inhaling the atmosphere of the frantic crowd. His paintings can be seen as a concentrated distillation of this social milieu, processed through his acute mental and sensory perceptions.

In a 2018 exhibition review, Shana Nys Dambrot described Kagoshima as “something of a bricoleur of his own surrounding, culling objects and collage elements from sources high and low, conceptual and commercial, pop and political.”⁷ Upon closer scrutiny, this characterization proves equally applicable to Kagoshima’s formative years as an artist. His insatiable curiosity and alchemic imagination led him to devise a unique visual lexicon that reflects the social and cultural dynamism of the period. The artist’s unique blend of Pop Art, fashion, and fantastic realism not only illuminates alternative approaches to artistic practice but also provides an invaluable window into the lived urban experience of Tokyo. His works hold potentials for expanding our understanding of this historical context and offer a more complete and nuanced picture of postwar Japanese art. Rather than remaining a peripheral figure, Kagoshima emerges as an important witness to Japan’s cultural transformation during this significant historical moment.

^NOTES

¹ Biographical information on the artist and his recollections are taken from a series of interviews conducted by Reiko Tomii in New York between March and July 2025, unless otherwise noted.
² For more details on Japanese artists’ reception of Pop Art, see Reiko Tomii, “Oiran Goes Pop: Contemporary Japanese Artists Reinventing Icons,” in The World Goes Pop, exh. cat., ed. Jessica Morgan and Flavia Friferi (London: Tate Publishing, 2015); and Ikegami Hiroko, “‘Drink More?’ ‘No, Thanks!’: The Spirit of Tokyo Pop,” in International Pop, exh. cat., ed. Darsie Alexander (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015).
³ Sarah Lea, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy Publications, 2015), 26.
⁴ Allen Jones was a well-known Pop artist in Japan. The Seibu Department Store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo organized the artist’s solo exhibition in March 1974.
⁵ For more information on the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, see Sofiya Valcheva, “Vienna School of Fantastic Realism,” Ilustromania, https://www.ilustromania.com/artistic-movements/vienna-school-of-fantastic-realism. In this essay, all URLs are last accessed on August 10, 2025. The following two quotes are taken from this website.
⁶ As recounted by Yutaka Ueda, a close friend of the artist and the owner of an izakaya style restaurant called Ichioku in Roppongi. Interview with the author, June 20, 2025. Ueda is the subject of the painting Portrait of Master (1974), which appears in the Nagai Gallery catalogue (the restaurant’s name, Ichioku, which means “a billion,” is written on the figure’s collar in Japanese). The work was originally conceived as a portrait of Ueda; however, Kagoshima drew his own face instead because he believed that the painting “demanded a more handsome figure.”
⁷ Shana Nys Dambrot, “The Box: E’wao Kagoshima,” Artillery Magazine, July 17, 2018, https://artillerymag.com/the-box-ewao-kagoshima/.