Sayonara Orimoto San

“We are not ‘Human Beings’ we are ‘Bread People”, the declaration made by hundreds, if not thousands of people; who from Tokyo to Venice, from Penzance to São Paolo; have been transformed into moving sculptures by the Japanese artist Tatsumi Orimoto, born in the Summer of 1946 at Kawasaki City an industrial city which remained his home until 23 February 2025.

The face of the Bread Man is a folkish mask, an icon who spoke to the public without the need for the gallery labels; it is poetic on the level of everyday madness. Last November for a New York Times article on the return of white bread, Tatsumi Orimoto was commissioned to make three self portraits. Dressed in a severe black jacket, a smart white shirt and tie; his face is obscured by crowns of dough that emanated a cosmic chaos which he said defined his life.

Tatsumi Orimoto originally thought he would be a painter and one the earliest surviving works is a still life of a baguette. In 1969 Odai Orimoto, his mother raised fees to studying painting in the USA at the California Institute of Art. In 1971 unable to tune into the West coast vibes he headed East for the more cosmopolitan New York art scene. At the Art Student League he was more at home and by 1972 was a studio assistant to Nam Jun Paik. The Performance art he became famous for internationally, was germinated in that ghostly topography of downtown Manhattan. Stories were told of providing food and water for the Coyote when Joseph Bueys came to New York wrapped in felt blanket in 1974 and how he refused to sell the Broken Clocks works exhibited at the Fluxus exhibition to its organiser Nam June Paik.

Without a private income Tatsumi Orimoto had worked in the famous Manhattan outpost of the Takashimaya department store. It was a boom time in the  down time of a city on its knees; a scene of happenings in loft spaces and derelict streets that transformed into stages for many of his early works, making art out of the debris of consumer culture.

In 1976 he moved back to Japan with a head full of new styles in art, earning money as a designer he and began to plan works in Japan and around the world that followed the Fluxus method of low or no cost materials and a disregard for the gallery as a space to make and share artworks.

By 1979 the work had evolved and in particular the use of photography as the primary medium, the beginning of a series of works; Event Communication. This method took Tatsumi Orimoto on journeys to the edge of art world where encounters and exchanges were exhibited in Japan and later internationally. With artworks such as; Event Photo Indian With A Bracelet 1979, Philippines Wearing Bracelet 1981, Pull to Ear : Japanese Wearing the Language (Words) 1979 -82 and Thai Living in the Mountains Wearing a Bracelet 1984, portraits are simultaneously formal, intimate and provocative; the artist exhibiting subjects alongside cards containing minimal and prosaic data; such as: name, occupation and site of the event; evoking a taxonomy of early colonial encounters. A style that focused on what would be later described as a relational aesthetic, in which the interaction of others was fundamental to the making of artworks.

Tatsumi Orimoto later became equally focused on the local, in particular the home and neighbourhood shared with his mother Odai Orimoto and her friends. To make such personal artworks requires a perspective that is empathetic to the micro ecology of others. Traditional values inhabit an indigenous habitat and Tatsumi Orimoto became increasingly interested in how cultural values of Japanese society have changed through globalisation. The increased discriminatory attitudes to ageing and disability became submerged beneath economic success. For Tatsumi Orimoto the home shared with Odai Orimoto became a site of exploration in which to document complex rituals of being and belonging.

The series of images with car tyres and cardboard boxes produced with bribes of expensive Sushi. The neighbours were surprised by suggestions of posing with car tyres as necklaces, but agreed partly because Odai Orimoto was so willing and she was their friend and her son was not crazy but an artist. This style of art is like that, you stand in a big box, or you pose in a garden wearing inner tubes on, international art becomes local art.

Primarily it was photography followed by film and video used to create documents of performances, whether this was with domestic animals or Odai Orimoto as an artist he always preferred the rough and the uncut to the manicured edit or special effects. These videos and photos are currently on display at Welcome Back; Yokohama Museum Of Art exhibition and his Grandmothers Lunch  series featured in the prestigious Roppongi Crossing: Coming & Going exhibition in 2022 at Mori Art Museum.

Beethoven Mama is perhaps the most infamous video, Tatsumi Orimoto massages Odai Orimoto’s hair as they both listen to Beethoven’s 5t. He became her primary carer in the late 1980s due to incremental mobility and memory loss. Artworks, such as Art Mama Diary (1998-2002), Breaman Son + Alzheimer-Mama (1996) and others broke taboos about private and public life as they were exhibited internationally but private works such as the Postcards he would send to her from around the world updating her on exhibitions and experiences celebrated their bond. This ritual became more stylised after she died when he continued to post with up to 100 cards to his home address for her ghost to read.

Odai Orimoto, together with brilliant long time collaborator, Noritosho Motoda, innumerable friends and    strangers also feature as cameos in extensive works on paper. These were often quickly produced in hotel suites, trains, planes and bars using pens, crayons and paint: uninhibited sketches  capture mesmerising. Ideas for performances or everyday observations reworked in a carnival of transgression and playfullness. Seldom seen outside of Japan one of the most poignant and celebrated series of drawings are those from the epic work documenting the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011.

The Skulls were drawn whilst taking a break from caring for Odai in a local gambling office and drawn on the betting slips. First seen in 2014 as part of the major retrospective of work Art X Life, curated for Kawasaki City Museum by Masafumi Fukagawa, they offer a delirious commentary on shared trauma. The bones of bodies collected on the beaches after the great tsunami had struck, waves and skulls being ancient subjects in Japanese art but with Tatsumi Orimoto they take an ominous turn, recorded on the detritus where men like his father can loose perspective.

Tatsumi Orimoto’s style of performance is impossible to initiate so it will perhaps not have followers in any traditional sense, however he is hugely popular with a new generation of Japanese artists who admire emotional integrity and the synthesis of a myriad of media to tell contemporary everyday stories.

In Europe there is Punch and Judy theatre similar to the dynamic Japanese tradition for puppetry, often supernatural in theme, Bunraku also known as Ningyo ̄ jo ̄ ruri, is a form in which the puppeteer is visible on stage. Tatsumi Orimoto has made more than fifty grotesque and brightly coloured finger dolls for improvised shows. These normally included conversations with Odai Orimoto about art and money but the themes were very flexible and could include the scandalous and unspeakable things that only puppets can say. That is the type of truth we seek in art, a truism hidden in plain sight.

In terms of reality perhaps the most radical work was, I Make up and Become Art Mama in 2018. Tasumi Orimoto performed this twice, The Venice Biennial for Venice Agendas and at his Tokyo Gallery Aoyama Meguro. Starting the event sitting in a light day dress while a professional make up artist attended to hair and maquillage, transforming a man into a woman. At the end of this process with curled hair, lipstick, eyeliner and blush the artist was in full drag. Not Kabuki Theatre but improvised performance of possession.  Tatsumi Orimoto spoke to his mother as if she was there while he moved around the gallery pulling dramatic poses in the famous Big Shoes. The artist created a transgressive space neither gendered or embodied but oscillating in a performative catharsis.

Our final collaboration was the film Tatsumi Orimoto: A Cosmic Chaos that won best short documentary at FAFF 2023. It was directed by David Bickerstaff and it captures a spontaneous creativity and subversive charm which made him one of the most loved artists to emerge from post atomic Japan.

We hope that the Art Mama Foundation that Tatsumi Orimoto established will take forward his profound  legacy of supporting emerging artists and speaking for the disquieting, the different and the disenfranchised.

Tatsumi Orimoto said of this style; “I aspire to create art which is not perceived as art, with freer and freer ideas exploring more and more diverse materials. If viewers are surprised by my artwork as they never thought such an expression could be considered art, that means they fall right into my trap. Even with these kinds of eccentric artworks my tenderness and commitment oozes from my life. While watching the great current of art history, diverse genres of expression such as religious painting, court portraiture, impressionist painting and abstract painting emerged, and the truth is that even artworks that were not accepted as such at the time can eventually merge into the mainstream art history. Such a chaotic cosmos of the art world really fascinates me.”

Sayonara Orimoto San.

Mark + Julia Waugh: Waugh Office.