Kawaguchi Tatsuo - Untitled (2023)

Description : 

This archival pigment print by Kawaguchi Tatsuo was produced for the 60th Anniversary Editions of MoMAK — the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto — in an edition of exactly 60, one per year of the institution’s history. Signed and numbered on a label affixed to the reverse.

The image is an unbroken field of oval marks — graphite-grey, charcoal, near-black — packed so densely that the white of the paper only barely survives at the edges and between forms. There is no composition in the conventional sense: no hierarchy, no focal point, no gesture of arrival or departure. The eye moves across the surface and finds no rest, no anchor, no exit. What appears at first glance as texture resolves, on closer looking, into the accumulation of individual marks, each one discrete, each one placed — the product of sustained, systematic attention applied to a surface over time.

Kawaguchi Tatsuo is one of the central figures of Mono-ha and the broader Japanese conceptual art scene from the late 1960s onward. His practice is built on the investigation of materials and processes in their most fundamental state — the relationship between a substance and the conditions it is subject to: gravity, time, repetition, accumulation. Where Lee Ufan, his Mono-ha contemporary, works through reduction and the isolated mark, Kawaguchi pursues saturation — the surface pushed toward a limit where the act of marking and the material being marked become indistinguishable. The result is a work that reads simultaneously as drawing, as field painting, and as a record of time made visible.

The MoMAK edition captures this logic in archival pigment on paper: a print that is also, in its own way, a document of a process — reproduction as a further iteration of the original inquiry

➡️ Contact us for any question

FAQ 

Is this an original Kawaguchi Tatsuo print?
Yes — an original archival pigment print, signed and numbered on a label on the reverse, from an edition of 60.

What is the MoMAK 60th Anniversary Edition?
A series of editions produced to mark the 60th anniversary of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (MoMAK), one of Japan’s foremost modern art institutions.

Who is Kawaguchi Tatsuo?
A key figure in Mono-ha — the Japanese avant-garde movement of the late 1960s concerned with revealing the relationships between materials, space and time — and one of the most rigorous conceptual artists working in Japan today.

Do you ship internationally?
Yes — worldwide, with full insurance and tracking.

You might also love Kaws— explore the collection !