SHUJI MUKAI

SHUJI MUKAI was born in 1936 in Kobe, Japan. In 1959, he met Sadamasa Motonaga at the Nishinomiya City Art Association and participated in the 8th Gutai Art Exhibition that same year. He officially joined the Gutai Art Association in 1961, becoming one of its youngest members. His artistic style is characterized by the accumulation of meaningless symbols, aiming to express the inefficacy of any value system—a concept that became the foundation of his unique creative approach. In 1964, MUKAI’s work was selected for the "New Japanese Painting and Sculpture" exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which later toured across the United States. MoMA subsequently added his work to its permanent collection. In 1966, he created a large-scale installation at the jazz-themed café "Check" in Umeda, Osaka, where the entire room was covered with symbols—marking the first instance in Japan of filling an entire space with such motifs. In 2013, he participated in the Gutai retrospective exhibition "Gutai: Splendid Playground" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where he recreated his iconic work "Symbol Room" and covered the museum’s elevators and restroom surfaces with millions of symbols.