Overview
From June 22 to September 14, 2025, the He Art Museum (HEM) presents Flow of Shades, the first solo exhibition in China by Gutai artist Takesada Matsutani. Featuring over 20 representative works created from the 1970s to the present, the exhibition showcases the artist’s signature vinyl glue paintings and installations.
Takesada Matsutani (b. 1937, Osaka) currently lives and works in Paris. A key figure of Japan’s pioneering avant-garde movement Gutai, he initially practiced classic nihonga painting and calligraphy. Later exposure to Western modernist artists such as Kandinsky and Antoni Tàpies inspired him to move toward a more abstract expression. At the same time, a long period of illness due to tuberculosis in his youth sparked a deep interest in the organic movement of the body.
In line with Gutai’s emphasis on material experimentation, Matsutani’s practice has long centered on exploring the inherent properties of materials. Since the early 1960s, inspired by the microscopic shapes of cells, he began experimenting with Elmer’s glue, a newly introduced material in Japan at the time. Drawn to its fluidity and plasticity, he discovered its potential to form three-dimensional, organic shapes on canvas. This marked the beginning of a creative journey that has lasted over six decades. By gently blowing air into the glue and guiding its flow, Matsutani allows the material to take on a life of its own—forming folds that seem to linger between movement and stillness.
After relocating to France in 1966, Matsutani explored printmaking in depth and was also painting in a Hard-edge style, before beginning to reconnect with East Asian aesthetics. Matsutani was particularly influenced by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows, which led him to embrace the subtle beauty of blackness. This shift prompted him to abandon color, covering the surfaces of his works instead with repetitive strokes of graphite pencil. What is considered his primary medium, vinyl glue, also regained a central role from the mid-1970s. The works featured in this exhibition span from that pivotal period to his most recent creations, with graphite shimmering delicately in dim light. The meticulously layered pencil lines further reveal the slow passage of time. Beneath these surfaces lies Matsutani’s enduring meditation on the cyclical nature of existence, like the rhythm of sun and moon, a flow of shades in perpetual motion.
Takesada Matsutani (b. 1937, Osaka) currently lives and works in Paris. A key figure of Japan’s pioneering avant-garde movement Gutai, he initially practiced classic nihonga painting and calligraphy. Later exposure to Western modernist artists such as Kandinsky and Antoni Tàpies inspired him to move toward a more abstract expression. At the same time, a long period of illness due to tuberculosis in his youth sparked a deep interest in the organic movement of the body.
In line with Gutai’s emphasis on material experimentation, Matsutani’s practice has long centered on exploring the inherent properties of materials. Since the early 1960s, inspired by the microscopic shapes of cells, he began experimenting with Elmer’s glue, a newly introduced material in Japan at the time. Drawn to its fluidity and plasticity, he discovered its potential to form three-dimensional, organic shapes on canvas. This marked the beginning of a creative journey that has lasted over six decades. By gently blowing air into the glue and guiding its flow, Matsutani allows the material to take on a life of its own—forming folds that seem to linger between movement and stillness.
After relocating to France in 1966, Matsutani explored printmaking in depth and was also painting in a Hard-edge style, before beginning to reconnect with East Asian aesthetics. Matsutani was particularly influenced by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows, which led him to embrace the subtle beauty of blackness. This shift prompted him to abandon color, covering the surfaces of his works instead with repetitive strokes of graphite pencil. What is considered his primary medium, vinyl glue, also regained a central role from the mid-1970s. The works featured in this exhibition span from that pivotal period to his most recent creations, with graphite shimmering delicately in dim light. The meticulously layered pencil lines further reveal the slow passage of time. Beneath these surfaces lies Matsutani’s enduring meditation on the cyclical nature of existence, like the rhythm of sun and moon, a flow of shades in perpetual motion.