Subtly Loosening Labels—Demythologizing and Fairness in the Expression of People with Disabilities

Viewed in formal terms, the Exploring III −Fragments of Art Born from Encounters− exhibition (hereafter, Exploring III) can be described as a comprehensive presentation of works by makers primarily affiliated with disability support institutions alongside works by contemporary artists.

One of the catalysts for presenting artists with disabilities and contemporary artists on ostensibly equal footing can be found in Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art, held in 1992 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After traveling to Madrid and Basel, the exhibition was presented in 1993 at the Setagaya Art Museum. By placing masterpieces of modern art alongside works of Outsider Art, the exhibition proposed a “parallel vision” that relativized the canon of art history. In Japan, it played a formative role in creating the conditions for the reception of Art Brut and Outsider Art.
The Borderless Art Museum NO-MA (hereafter, NO-MA), which opened in 2004 in Ōmihachiman, Shiga Prefecture, has likewise pursued a similar format. (The author served as a curator at the museum from 2017 to 2022.) NO-MA articulates its concept as “presenting, without distinction, a wide range of expressions, including works created by people with disabilities and contemporary art” (quoted from the museum’s website). Operated by a social welfare corporation, the museum’s initiative may be understood as grounded in the ideal of realizing an inclusive society in which people live together beyond the presence or absence of disability. This model has also been adopted by museums established after NO-MA that are similarly rooted in welfare institutions, such as the Tomonotsu Museum in Hiroshima Prefecture and the Hajimari Art Center in Fukushima Prefecture. Today, it has become a recognizable “template” within the intersecting field of welfare and the arts.
Formally speaking, Exploring III may also be said to stand within the same lineage. However, the impression I received upon viewing the exhibition was somewhat different from those earlier examples. For in exhibitions that adopt this model, one often finds emphasized either a critical stance that seeks to relativize the institutions of art, or a didactic framework aligned with social welfare. Here, by contrast, such elements were strikingly absent from the foreground.
To begin with, it seemed unlikely that a visitor arriving at the exhibition without prior knowledge would readily realize, on their own, that artists with disabilities were included among the participants. This reticence was evident, for example, in the wording of the organizers’ introductory remarks. The term “disabled person” does not appear there even once. Instead, the artists are described in highly careful terms as “individuals who, even if verbal communication may be difficult, express themselves through visual form, conveying phenomena that are hard to articulate in words and presenting sensory experience.” Only by reading the individual artist profiles closely would a viewer infer that several of the exhibiting artists have some form of disability.
At NO-MA, where I was formerly employed, it was likewise a general principle to refrain from explicitly stating whether individual artists had disabilities. However, at that institution, the very concept of “borderless” that defined the museum, as well as its very existence, could be said to have already eloquently conveyed an inclusive message premised on the presence of artists with disabilities.
By contrast, the Exploring III exhibition appears to push even that underlying premise decisively into the background, refraining from making any overt claims about messages associated with disability. Despite the fact that more than half of the participating artists are creators with disabilities, the exhibition deliberately dilutes that information. What kind of landscape, then, was it seeking to bring into view through this curatorial choice?

Deconstructing the Myths Surrounding the Art of People with Disabilities—Learning as the Central Theme

As noted earlier, although the Exploring III exhibition incorporates the element of the artists’ disabilities, it deliberately pushes that aspect into the background. What this restrained curatorial approach offers may well be a shrewd critical perspective on the images of “self-taught” or “solitary” artists that discourses surrounding the art of people with disabilities, as well as adjacent categories such as Art Brut and Outsider Art, have so often reproduced in relation to artists’ personal attributes.
In this country, the gaze directed toward “artists with disabilities” has, from the postwar period to the present, been deeply imbued with romanticism. A historic example is the image of Yamashita Kiyoshi, who achieved nationwide popularity as the “wandering genius painter.” While Yamashita represents only one typical case, it is worth recalling that what is now referred to as savant syndrome was once labeled “idiot savant,” suggesting that there has long existed a cultural tendency to separate persons with extraordinary abilities from mainstream society by casting them as “exceptional geniuses.” Layered onto this foundation, I would argue, was the term Art Brut, which rapidly gained currency in Japan from the 2010s onward, further reinforcing and fixing such images.
Originally proposed by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut referred to forms of expression produced by creators untainted by the mechanisms of “culture,” such as established art education, trends, or the market. In Japan, however, the term came to be received as something almost inseparable from artistic practices by people with disabilities (due to space constraints, this essay cannot delve further into that discussion). As a result, characteristics frequently attributed to Art Brut, such as “distance from professional training” or “an internal impulse,” served to reinforce the label of an “inviolable solitude” attached to artists with disabilities. One might argue that this, in turn, accelerated their mythologization as privileged or even transcendent beings, as though they belonged to some realm “on the other side.”
Given this background, it is striking that one of the exhibition’s key concepts is “learning.” In the section titled “Forms of Learning,” four artists are introduced: Morimoto Eri, Katsunobu, Matsumoto Kunizo, and Hirata Yasuhiro. What connects them are the processes of responding to others and to their environment, such as the acquisition of techniques and principles. Here, instead of the dramatic fiction of the “solitary genius,” the exhibition matter-of-factly presents a perspective that reconsiders each work as the crystallization of having noticed something and learned from it.
If one looks closely at the actual history, it is not the case that artistic expression by people with disabilities has existed without forms of artistic learning alongside it. A representative example can be found at the Kyoto-based support facility Mizunoki, where, from the time of its establishment in 1964, the Japanese-style painter Nishigaki Chuichi led painting classes. Through experimentation with materials and dialogue-based explorations of expression, practices of learning were sustained there for several decades. Nishigaki later went on to help found Atelier Hiko in Osaka. The fact that Oe Masahiko and Matsumoto Kunizo, both of whom have been active at this facility, are included in the present exhibition may be understood as drawing renewed attention to a lineage of learning that has often been rendered invisible in previous discourses.
Alternatively, from a different perspective, we must also attend to the dangers inherent in discourses that distance people with disabilities from learning. In Japan, there was once a period when individuals with severe disabilities were exempted from compulsory education and effectively excluded from public educational institutions on the grounds of their impairments. Recalling this history, in which many people with disabilities were not institutionally guaranteed access to education, the exhibition’s effort to reconnect them to the cultural continuum of learning in artistic expression can be understood as deeply significant.

Fair Curation and Its Development into the Art Market

At first glance, the Exploring III exhibition presents itself with an air of remarkable restraint. Yet beneath this subdued appearance, one senses a shrewdly conscious effort to dismantle the myths that have long clung to the art of people with disabilities. In such a myth-dismantling approach, how are the works to be viewed? Walking through the venue, one is struck by the way creators working in welfare facilities and contemporary artists seem to resonate with one another purely as works, with the “noise” of personal attributes stripped away.
In particular, the pairing of Saito Aya and Oe Masahiko was breathtaking. The undulating energy emanating from their works eloquently testified to the inevitability of their being placed in the same space. This was not a juxtaposition designed to have their respective attributes complement one another; rather, the works resonated as independent expressions. Such an exhibition, which allows one to sense the “autonomy of the artwork,” is made possible precisely because the narrative of “disability” has been carefully pushed into the background through curatorial decisions, and the works are treated with fairness.
If I may venture slightly beyond the immediate scope of the discussion, one cannot help but hope that this curatorial fairness will also permeate the sphere in which artworks by people with disabilities are bought and sold. The reason is that capacious, a co-organizer of the present exhibition, was originally founded with the aim of connecting artistic practices by people with disabilities to the contemporary art market as the core of its activities. The organization has continued to present booths at domestic art fairs, seeking to open up channels that link welfare contexts with the contemporary art market.
In recent years, opportunities to encounter prints and reproductions of works by artists with disabilities in public spaces have clearly increased, often through CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives and government-led public projects. Fashion items and everyday goods bearing transferred images of their works have also become commonplace in urban settings. Yet while such surface-level forms of consumption continue to expand, opportunities for original works to be bought and sold on the same footing as contemporary art remain extremely limited. Even at art fairs and similar venues, one rarely encounters works by artists with disabilities. In this sense, a substantive division based on personal attributes persists—an “unfair” situation, so to speak.
The fact that an organization seeking to connect such practices to the art market has conceived an exhibition that conveys such a strong sense of fairness is encouraging. It invites hope that this same sincerity will extend further, toward preventing unfair structures within the art market and the unjust exploitation of artists, and toward building forms of evaluation within the market that are both appropriate and equitable.
The Exploring III exhibition did not strike one as a show that loudly proclaims a forceful message. Yet its carefully measured approach, evident throughout, succeeded in freeing artists from the labels of personal attributes and presenting them to viewers simply as artists in their own right. One can only hope that the sense of fairness manifested in this exhibition will continue seamlessly into the sphere of economic activity of the buying and selling of artworks and remain consistently upheld there as well.