From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyo and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan

When the contemporary art critic Haryü Ichiro coined the phrase "international contemporaneity" (kokusai-teki döjisei) in the 1960s, it soon gained popularity among Japanese arts professionals, denoting the confluence of the global and local artistic tendencies rather than the one-way influence of Western modernism on non-Western art.1 Recent scholarship in post-1945 Japanese art reveals numerous stylistic parallels between Japanese and Euro-American art movements in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but their dynamics cannot be reduced to simplistic, causal relationships.2 Joining such ongoing efforts in revising contemporary art history in a more global manner, this essay demonstrates the multiplicity of contemporary art practice through a case study of a remarkable artistic confluence as seen in From Space to Environment. In its manifestolike collective statement printed in the exhibition flyer, the group advocated the English term environment (pronounced enbairamento), as well as its Japanese translation kankyo, as a socially relevant concept connecting separate genres in the arts, namely, visual art, music, design, and architecture.6 Distinct from its common, vernacular ecological usage today, I argue that environment or kankyo functioned as a precursor to the later popularized term intermedia, which originally referred to the indefinable area that exists among different media.7 The exhibition title From Space to Environment (Kukan kara kankyo e) reflected the shared awareness of the internationally popularized term environment in art and urban design among the participants.