At 92, Artist Ay-O Finally Receives Acclaim for His Multicolored Universe

Sensory joy is often overlooked in contemporary art. A quality almost intentionally dodged, glee, perhaps, is too close to the banal. “Happy Rainbow Hell,” the National Museum of Asian Art’s survey of Ay-O’s decades-spanning career proves otherwise. In the artist’s first U.S. museum show, colors burst and light emanates joy in the show’s psychedelic silkscreen prints with strips of bright hues. The show’s curator Kit Brooks noted the artist’s expansive approach: “Rainbow is about everything visible in the light spectrum.”

The Japanese artist, who is now 92, is obsessed with capturing the entire breadth of optic potential. “The audience generally considers Japanese printmaking through very specific iconographies, but there is so much depth and variety in the tradition,” Brooks said. “Ay-O’s rainbows are multi-sensorial artworks that capture the viewer and make them almost feel the colors.”

Sensory stimulation was already among the pillars of the artist’s practice when he moved to New York in 1958. Soon after, he was introduced to the Fluxus circle and the group’s founder George Maciunas through his friend Yoko Ono. The show fittingly starts with a display of a MoMA loan Fluxkit (1964), which features curious participatory pieces by key East Asian Fluxus members such as Nam June Paik (who at some point was Ay-O’s roommate), Kosugi Takehisa, and Ay-O himself, whose work, a tiny cubic piece with a hole on top, reads “tactile box.” Finger Box Set (no.26) is another work from 1964, borrowed from the Walker Art Center: A suitcase holds 15 boxes, each with a different sensory promise through various textures hidden inside, such as a fuzzy feather, cushiony foam, and a cold coin.

Ay-O later expanded his fixation on touch from finger to arm boxes, and eventually built a full body suit that encased the participant completely with tactile stimulation. The orange, coffin-like box appeared on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” where the artist and Yoko Ono demonstrated their creation. Years later, they ritualistically burnt it in a Fluxus memorial for Maciunas. While these loans are too precious today to allow for public interaction, Brooks tapped New York–based collective Artechouse to reinterpret Ay-O’s boxes with similarly haptic creations that use ultrasonic wave generators. The sensations that are available to experience are based on a list of tactile materials such as stocking, plastic, or industrial foam that Ay-O created in 1969.

The show then blossoms into rainbow prints, which radiate a kinetic energy, an illusory, almost 3D experience on the flat paper. The repertoire of inspirations in Ay-O’s prints vary from art history to the everyday—from the repeated motif of the artist’s face in silhouette to a traditional Utagawa Kunisada print of two Sumo wrestlers. One of the artist’s drives was to challenge Western art history’s systematic dismissal of Asian art, while also questioning his own association with his culture, particularly in works that stem from traditional Japanese woodblock prints. At the same time, he was committed to pushing the limits of what a work on paper could dimensionally capture: His works reconfigure what the eye sees on a flat surface.

In the late 1960s, Ay-O began experimenting with light and color, first covering his Canal Street studio’s walls with bent aluminum sheets to reflect his own rainbows inside. “He was always interested in gradation in his color spectrums, not a smooth transition between the strips,” Brooks said. After starting out with 24 colors, he expanded his palette to 198 in his silkscreening process, which involved adding one oil pigment at a time in every printing pull. Each print took around three to six months due to each color’s separate, three-day drying period.

While entering into New York’s art scene as an Asian man was a challenge, he found a community—including fellow Asian artists—in the Fluxus group, and collaborations ensued.

Then, Mr Ay-O got drunk by the Rainbow (1974) is a great example of the artist finding his own voice within the experimental group. Here, a grid of 38 screen-prints show Ay-O in the titular state, his face pressed into a commercial photocopier screen. Electric hues of pink, yellow, green, and orange wash over his intoxicated expression, while a few prints show a wine glass or a bottle. The humorous work is a collaboration with fellow Fluxus member Alison Knowles, who suggested that Ay-O should experiment with a colorful photocopier that she heard was available at Lexington Avenue’s 3M building, for $80 an hour. The duo split the cost and captured his face in various states of indulgence. Ay-O later visited the printer solo and this time brought a suitcase full of colored glass sheets to further experiment. A lush purple velvet box was used to store the complete series, adding a sense of warmth to the colorful images’ optic flamboyance.