Fukuoka Michio

Born in Sakai City, Osaka in 1936. Shortly after his birth, he went to Beijing, China, and returned to Japan after the war. He lived in Kaizu, Shiga Prefecture until his second year of junior high school. He aspired to be a sculptor from early on and entered the Sculpture Department of the Osaka Municipal Art Institute in 1955, and attracted attention with his first solo exhibition in 1958 with the “SAND” series of plaster casts in sand by the seashore. Since then, he has exhibited the anti-artistic work “Nothing to Do” and “Pink Balloon,” in which he used sighs as sculptural material. Sculptures of the black box-like atelier, the surrounding scene, and the expression of waves. In 2005, he became aware of the return of imagination and became a “sculptor who does not create”. Major exhibitions include “New Generation of Contemporary Art” (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1966), “The 16th Sao Paulo Biennial” (1981), “Yokohama Triennale 2014”, and “Michio Fukuoka: Sculptor without Tsukuraru” (National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2017).