ABSTRACT

Niryu Nagata and Shuzo Takiguchi elaborated the exact meaning of their club’s new name in a lecture that was reported on in Photo Times in May 1939, saying that it does not mean the change of interest but offers a better focus to existing practice. It was Minoru Sakata who theorized the triple relationship between Surrealism, photography and abstraction in Japan through the medium’s technological capabilities and from a practitioner’s point of view. In a similar way to revolutionary literature or avant-garde art, psychoanalysis was also understood to be a ‘danger’ in 1930s Japan. Although the articulation of ‘plasticity’ entailed a significant theoretical debate about the connections between Surrealist and abstract painting and photography in Japan, the Surrealist object still remained the main preoccupation in practice. In June 1939, a special volume of Camera Art, dedicated to the ‘new inquiry in plasticity’, evidences a strong affiliation between the members of different clubs following Takiguchi’s announcement of the new term.