NEW YORK, NY.- Fergus McCaffrey New York has opened The Expanded Field of Mono-Ha, an exhibition that reconsiders the emergence of Mono-Ha within the broader history of Japan’s postwar avant-garde. On view through July 31, 2026, the exhibition brings together three generations of artists whose work helped reshape ideas of sculpture, material, space, and artistic action in the decades after World War II.

The exhibition takes as a point of departure two landmark works: Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenging Mud of 1955 and Nobuo Sekine’s Phase—Mother Earth of 1968. Widely regarded as defining expressions of Gutai and Mono-Ha respectively, both works were made through direct physical engagement with raw materials such as mud, water, earth, cement, and concrete. In different ways, they gave form to the “concreteness” and embodied force of Gutai, as well as the matter-of-fact presence central to Mono-Ha, often described as the “school of things.”

Shiraga’s Challenging Mud was performed at the Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo, while Sekine’s Phase—Mother Earth was created for the 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, held just 15 miles from Ashiya City, the home of Gutai. Their proximity, both geographic and conceptual, offers a starting point for the exhibition’s larger argument: that Mono-Ha did not emerge in isolation, but in dialogue with earlier experiments in Japanese avant-garde art.

The idea of the outdoor exhibition had already been pioneered in Japan by Gutai founder Jiro Yoshihara with the 1955 Experimental Outdoor Modern Art Exhibition to Challenge the Burning Midsummer Sun, staged in a park in Ashiya. There, Yoshihara encouraged younger artists “to create art that has never been created before,” establishing a radical ambition that would define a generation of Japanese avant-garde practice.

Yoshihara’s challenge was rooted in a desire to acknowledge and move beyond inherited artistic traditions, theories, and techniques in the aftermath of World War II. His ideas were later codified in the influential Gutai Manifesto of 1956, which helped secure Gutai’s place as one of the most internationally recognized movements of the postwar period.





By the 1960s, Gutai represented a model of artistic achievement for Japanese artists working with unconventional materials, experimental methods, and new aesthetic philosophies. It was within this atmosphere that Mono-Ha emerged. Unlike Gutai, however, Mono-Ha developed without a formal manifesto, leader, or governing structure. Its artists and theorists often presented their work as if its innovations had arisen in a historical vacuum, overlooking or distancing themselves from earlier Japanese precedents.

The Expanded Field of Mono-Ha challenges that separation. The exhibition establishes affinities and historical connections among Gutai, Neo-Dada, and Mono-Ha practices in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, revealing the depth and interconnectivity of Mono-Ha within broader histories of the Japanese postwar avant-garde.

Drawing from Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” the exhibition features work by Jiro Yoshihara, Kazuo Shiraga, Toshio Yoshida, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Jiro Takamatsu, Nobuaki Kojima, Nobuo Sekine, Lee Ufan, Noriyuki Haraguchi, and Koji Enokura.

The exhibition opens with an excerpt from the Gutai Manifesto: “In Gutai Art, the human spirit and matter shake hands with each other while keeping their distance. Matter never compromises itself with the spirit; the spirit never dominates matter. When matter remains intact and exposes its characteristics, it starts telling a story and even cries out.”

Through this lens, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider Mono-Ha not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of a larger, living field of postwar experimentation in which matter, action, space, and perception became inseparable.