Aiko Miyawaki featured in Anti-Action at MOMAT, Tokyo

05.06.2026

The exhibition Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan concluded in February 2026 at the The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT). What remains of this important project is the valuable exhibition catalogue published by the museum, which serves as an essential reference for scholars of postwar Japanese art and for collectors alike.

The exhibition offered a critical reassessment of the work of a group of Japanese women artists active between the 1950s and 1960s, challenging historical narratives that had long diminished or overlooked their contributions. Alongside internationally celebrated figures such as Yayoi Kusama and Atsuko Tanaka, the exhibition brought renewed attention to a generation of women whose work remained on the margins of artistic discourse for decades.

Among the artists featured, Aiko Miyawaki occupies a particularly significant position. Although she had been active on the international art scene since the 1960s, her work only began to receive broader institutional recognition from the 1990s onward. Anti-Action reaffirms her importance within the experimental practices of postwar Japan, highlighting her original contribution to the development of abstraction and to artistic investigations centered on space, light, and immaterial phenomena.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition restores visibility to a generation of women artists whose contributions are now undergoing a necessary and increasingly wide-ranging reappraisal.

Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT)
16 dicembre 2025 – 8 febbraio 2026.