MUKAI SHUJI Symbol Warp Series

• LOT

  1840

• Artist

  MUKAI SHUJI ( 1940 - )

• Estimate

  200,000 - 300,000 8,696 - 13,043 10,000 - 15,000 40,000 - 60,000 1,250 - 1,875

  JPY RMB HKD TWD USD

• Result

  Members only

• Details

  mixed media　framed　1993
  titled, dated and signed on the reverse
  accompanied by a registration certificate
  
  MUKAI SHUJI is a key figure of the second generation of the Gutai Art Association, a leading force in the postwar Japanese avant-garde. He first exhibited in a Gutai exhibition in 1959 and joined the Gutai Art Association in 1961. Thereafter, he consistently developed his symbol-based works, in which distinctive forms such as circles, crosses, and triangles are repeatedly and extensively arranged across paintings and spaces. In Room of Symbols (1961), he covered not only the pictorial surface but the entire space, including his own body, with symbols, extending his practice beyond the boundaries of painting into the environment itself. For Mukai, symbols functioned less as signs intended to convey specific meanings than as an independent visual language formed through repetition and accumulation, structuring both paintings and spaces. The rhythm and energy generated by countless symbols challenge the boundaries between painting and space, while recasting the world itself as a new system of symbols—an essential characteristic of Mukai's symbol-based practice.
  
  What is important in this work is not simply the act of applying symbols to the surface of an object, but the idea of transforming the object itself into a system of symbols. The pyramid-like structure is entirely covered with countless symbols, transcending its original form and significance as an object to become a new structure formed through the accumulation of symbols. This demonstrates how Mukai's practice of "symbolization," which had long involved covering paintings and spaces with symbols, developed in the 1990s into an attempt to transform the very meaning and value of objects into another state.
  
  21.5×25.0cm
  (8 ½ × 9 ⅞ in.)　

• Organizer

  Jo's Auction

• Auction

  Jo’s Auction Autumn Auction of Art Works 2026

• Catalog

  Contemporary Art/Modern&Post-War Art

• Date

  2026/10/21