Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Gutai & The Playground of Signs
In February 2013, EEPMON had the distinct honour of participating in the grand opening of Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Co-curated by Ming Tiampo and Alexandra Munroe, this landmark exhibition was the first North American museum retrospective dedicated to the Gutai Art Association, Japan’s most influential avant-garde collective.
As part of the opening festivities, EEPMON joined a group performance of “Playground of Signs” by the legendary Gutai artist Shuji Mukai. The performance involved covering a designated architectural space with Mukai’s signature symbols—a practice that blurs the boundaries between art, physical space, and the act of creation itself.
Why this experience was pivotal:
∙ Artistic Lineage: The Gutai mantra, “Do what has never been done before,” serves as a guiding principle for EEPMON’s work. Participating in this performance provided a physical connection between contemporary generative practice and the historical roots of radical Japanese art.
∙ Global Stage: Performing at the Guggenheim—one of the world’s most iconic cultural institutions—placed the artist’s work in a global context alongside pivotal figures of 20th-century art history.
∙ Cultural Synthesis: This project represented a full-circle moment, bridging academic studies of Gutai at Carleton University to becoming an active participant in its continued history within the New York art world.
Participating in the Gutai opening was an immersion into a philosophy of play, experimentation, and boundary-breaking that remains central to the EEPMON aesthetic today.
The exhibition was co-curated by Ming Tiampo, Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa, and Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Their collaboration brought a rigorous scholarly and curatorial perspective to this historic retrospective, bridging Canadian academic research with New York’s global artistic stage.
For further details regarding the exhibition and its historical significance, please visit the official Guggenheim website at the link below:
http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/gutai/
