"Unseen Form," a Sumi ink work on paper by Toko Shinoda, is in the exhibit "Resounding Spirit: Japanese Contemporary Art of the 1960s." Click photo for larger image.

Seventy-two-year-old Japanese artist Ushio Shinohara, diminutive and sporting a gray Mohawk, strips to the waist in the DVD "Boxing Painting" and dons protective glasses. He then pulls on a pair of new boxing gloves, dips them into prepared cans of white and shamrock green paints, and turns to face a 25-foot-long magenta canvas anchored to the wall.

This he attacks with a ferocity generally reserved for the ring, throwing punches, dodging and leaping. Each blow that he delivers as he moves the length of the canvas leaves an irreversible mark, so each has to be on target.

By the end of the performance, Shinohara is covered with paint, and a respectable painting is completed. The viewer is nonplussed. It's had its intended effect.

Shinohara reenacted the "Boxing Painting Performance," which he initiated in the 1960s, for the 2004 opening of the exhibition "Resounding Spirit: Japanese Contemporary Art of the 1960s/The Gibson Gallery Collection" at SUNY at Potsdam.

The illuminating exhibition, comprising approximately 50 abstract paintings and works on paper, is at the University Art Gallery, University of Pittsburgh, through Dec. 9.

	"Rocks and Waterfall" by Kenzo Okada. Click photo for larger image.

Postwar Japanese artists were, as was the rest of their nation and much of the world, attempting to regroup after a devastating war -- with the added onus of military defeat and the requisite examination of the value system that led to it.

Participation in an international conversation was part of their effort to rethink the traditional mind set. Artists exhibited in the large biennials, such as the Carnegie International, and some moved to Western art centers.

Within Japan, two major trends evolved, according to exhibition catalog essayist Ming Tiampo. "Reportage" painting, based in realism, depicted the horrors of war and postwar society. The other attempted to modernize traditional arts and was epitomized by Genbi, a contemporary art discussion group that focused on abstraction, a forward-looking attitude and an interdisciplinary membership embracing painters and sculptors, calligraphers and flower-arrangement masters.

Open exhibitions and rental galleries gave avant-garde artists options for bypassing the conventional gallery system and showing their work publicly.

In 1955, Jiro Yoshihara, an artist and successful industrialist who'd been active in Genbi, formed Gutai, an avant-garde movement that gained international recognition. Its publications were found in Jackson Pollock's studio after his death, and many Western notables, such as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning, visited the artists in Japan.

Gutai concerns included re-inventing painting -- not eliminating it, which exhibition authors stress is a historic misconception -- through such practices as treating unique venues (nature, the stage) as part of the artwork, and incorporating elements of time and movement. They actively courted print media to spread their ideas.

Gutai is represented in the exhibition by eight of its some-25 members, including Yoshihara, whose elegant "Blue Calligraphic Lines on Dark Blue" of 1963, sweeping blue brushstrokes against an inky background, has the spellbinding beauty of fireworks in the half-second past their peak of streaking.

The movement entered the artworld consciousness with a bang when Yoshihara introduced the "First Gutai Art Exhibition" in 1955 by leaping through a wall of paper. It continued until his death in 1972.

Other work ranges from the colorful, complex optical patterns of Toshinobu Onosato's painstakingly painted "Two Circles" to the harmonious balance struck between traditional and modern in the masterful "Rocks and Waterfall" by Kenzo Okada.

Hidetaka Ohno expresses resistance to traditional "Japanese style" painting through nonconventional methods and materials in "Visual Meditation," which places a rectangular burlap element atop a thick field of dusted red pigment, while Yoshishige Saito's reserved oil painting of rows of parallel markings, "Work: Blue," retains some traditional visual lineage.

The exhibition reveals the variety, creativity, originality and richness of a time of great change in Japanese art. That inventiveness was recognized in a 1965 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, "The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture," in which many of the "Resounding" artists exhibited.

Some of the works wear their time period less well than others, but that's inescapable in a historic exhibition. The revelation is that so many of them retain striking presence.

"Spirit" continues through Dec. 9 in the Frick Fine Arts Building, across from the Carnegie Library on Schenley Drive. Admission is free. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and until 8 p.m. Thursday. An informative 155-page color illustrated catalog includes a heartfelt essay by Roland Gibson about his collecting habits ($10). For information, including events: 412-648-2423 or vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/uag.

Artists at PCA

At 6 p.m. tomorrow, exhibiting artists Ron Donoughe, Carol Brode and Kathleen Dlugos will talk about their work at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (412-361-0873 or www.pittsburgharts.org).

Borofsky lecture

Jonathan Borofsky, whose public sculpture "Walking to the Sky" was installed at CMU in May, will give a free public lecture at 6 p.m. Friday in the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater, followed by a reception. His environmental installation, "Human Structures," opens in the museum's Forum Gallery Saturday (412-622-3131 or www.cmoa.org).