Japan's limited progress at Tohoku's Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant after damage from the Great Eastern Japan earthquake and tsunami makes the March opening of this Taro Okamoto exhibition seem apocalyptic. Okamoto's unique avant-garde style was deeply influenced by the West. He found contradictions in the Western idea of "progress," which included nuclear technology, and this became the driving force of his artistic re-discovery of the notion of "Japan."
Okamoto was an artist who liked to play with opposing ideas. At the entrance of the exhibition, an alien shaped sculpture, named "Non" welcomes you, while other sculptures such as "Kappa" (water imp) and "Jyurei" (spirit of a tree) offer a playful, even animistic and spiritual atmosphere of Japan but in a Western and modern artistic form.
In 1929, at age 18, Okamoto left Japan for Paris, where seeing the work of Picasso for the first time brought him to tears. Interested in philosophy and anthropology, he studied Hegelian dialectic under Alexandre Kojeve and ethnology under Marcel Mauss at the Universite Paris Sorbonne — he even joined Acephale, philosophical writer George Bataille's secret society. In 1932, Okamoto became the youngest member of Abstraction-Creation, an international association of abstract artists.