Mitsutoshi Hanaga Archives Project

Based on four themes of avant-garde art, Butoh (avant-garde dance), theater, and social situation, around 200 photographs, selected from the archive of Mitsutoshi Hanaga, etc., will be exhibited.
Mitsutoshi Hanaga was born in Tokyo, 1933. He went through the turbulent times from the late 1950s to 1980s when Japanese society experienced a drastic transition and he left behind a huge amount of photographs throughout his lifetime.
While living in postwar Japan, which was burdened with various contradictions and social issues, Hanaga continued to record the reality of diverse scenes such as avant-garde art, underground theater, current events, the pollution issue, the student movement, Butoh, and the commune movement through photography from a perspective of the weak and outcast. The existence of Hanaga, who continued to focus on struggling youths seeking their meaning of existence by close contact, has legendarily been remembered and thought of as “an artist behind a system.”
However, in recent years, along with the full picture of his photographic works is being revealed, the existence of Hanaga is attracting remarkable attention internationally not only as “a witness of the era” and “a photographer,” but also in the context of performance art, saying “his radical, repeated actions themselves, shooting while intervening in the locale, would be considered as his artistic expression.”