Mavo

Mavo

Mavo was a radical Japanese art movement of the 1920s. Founded in 1923, they were productive during the late Taishō period (1912–26). Mavo re-instituted the Japanese Association of Futurist Artists, the anarchistic artist group who displayed an outdoor exhibit in Ueno Park in Tokyo in protest of conservatism in the Japanese art world.Led by Tomoyoshi Murayama, the group deployed an interdisciplinary array of performance art, painting, illustration and architecture, to communicate anti-establishment messages to the mainstream. Fueled by responses to industrial development, the Mavo group created works about crisis, peril and uncertainty. Art Historian, Gennifer Weisenfeld has written that Mavo sought to reintegrate art into daily life.“Mavoist” artists sought to disrupt or blur the boundaries between art and daily life. They rebelled against the establishment by combining industrial products with painting or printmaking, usually in collage form. Their performance art protests against social injustice deployed theatrical eroticism, that mocked public norms for morality at the time.

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