A tall young man with glasses looked down at the girl holding a big white sheet of paper on her lap. It was at the far end of the playground near a jungle gym. The sun was strong and the wind was cool. There were little bushes and trees and sand on the ground to play with.The image is still so clear. Maybe he wasn’t so tall, but he was always standing, and I was always sitting and looking up to his smiling face to find some answer. And he would say, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about making mess.” I wanted to impress him by making something beautiful. But there was no success. Knowing my intention or not, he was always just there in the same relaxed manner, standing with his back to the sun.My kindergarten teacher, Saburo Murakami, passed away in January 1996. He didn’t see the first retrospective exhibition of his influential works of art. It was held in April that year at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Ashiya, a small town in southern Japan, which was the birthplace of the Gutai movement. There, in 1956, the group’s extremely bold and free works were shown at the Pine Park, in an exhibition titled “The Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun.” It took place twenty-four hours a day for thirteen days.Murakami had organized Zero Society with his artist friends Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, and Akira Kanayama in 1952. They joined the Gutai Art Association, led by an impresario Jiro Yoshihara, who wrote in the Gutai Manifesto for the group’s first exhibit in Tokyo in October 1955. It read: “Gutai art does not transform material but brings it to life. The material remains what it is, and when stimulated it reveals its properties and tells us—even shouts out—something of itself.” By keeping the Zero members as a core, Gutai flourished as an important art movement in Japan. It was a birth of the first abstract art movement in the country and happened ten years after World War II. According to Alexandra Munroe, the curator of “Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky,” an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Soho in 1994: The noun gutai, which literally means “concreteness,” is composed of two characters: gu, signifying tool or means, and tai, signifying body or substance. Using this name, Gutai signified concrete enactments of individual character, emotion, and thought in opposition to cerebral and abstract aesthetics. … The Gutai artists appropriated a variety of natural and manufactured materials to reenact the aggressive freedom of birth itself. … Gutai engaged in its own form of “action event” and “action painting” as an explosive rite to stomp out the dark orthodoxies of prewar Imperial Japanese culture and usher in the liberal American-style “democracy’ which history had unexpectedly granted.Nowadays an outdoor exhibit isn’t so unusual, and we’ve seen them in many different countries. But over a half century ago, in a Zen and very proud, small ancient country, this event was quite challenging and a revolutionary act for its culture, as well as its artistic circles. However, nobody involved thought or even cared if this might prove to be a landmark day in the history of Japanese modern art or even in the history of art in the world.For this first exhibition, Murakami created a big tent that pierced the sky between the pine trees. Later, he became known for his paper-breaking piece in which he made a sort of shoji paper screen with several layers of brown paper and ran through it. His running action created an enormous sound and its impact generated the images of the torn papers left behind. In another work, in order to paint without touching the canvas, he threw a ball from a distance. The bouncing ball left a beautiful stain on the canvas.My favorite work of his is a wooden box containing a clock that strikes at odd timing. When you rest your ear on the top of box, you feel like the box itself has a life or expresses something. Most of his works are simple and clear, but these effects are as bold as human movements, like dancing.Renowned French and American art critics were very interested in photographs of this exhibition and tried to promote Gutai in their home countries. The pictures of Gutai’s exhibition opening appeared in the New York Times the following week, and it is believed they played a role in igniting the Happenings movement in the United States. Allan Kaprow, a founder of the Happenings movement and an art historian, had obtained some of Gutai’s photos that he later included in his 1966 book Assemblages, Environments & Happenings. When I interviewed Kaprow in the late eighties, I learned that he and Murakami had kept their friendship alive for a long time after their initial mail contact in the mid-fifties.Since Murakami served as a facilitator in Gutai’s international collaborations, and had direct contact with French, German, and Dutch critics, this fact may not be a big surprise. He also was an editor of Gutai’s newsletters and a central figure in the creation of the philosophy of the movement. Many members looked up to him for Gutai principles and direction.However, to a four-year-old girl, Murakami was just an art teacher at her kindergarten. Not an avant-garde artist who did such amazing things. Certainly, he was a unique teacher. I strongly remember the joy of putting my sandy hands on paper covered with glue. The sensation of my dirty, sticky hands moving freely on the paper remains in my mind. Another time, I used a nail to scrape a paper that had been completely covered and messed up with different colors of crayon. This process was also absolutely yucky, just like the action on the glue paper. But when I scraped it in all directions, I felt such incredible relief and freedom! What I saw was the very interesting lines and beautiful colors emerge with my actions. “Just do it. You’ll feel great,” Murakami would say. This way of art creation may not seem so unique now, but six decades ago in a very traditional country, where all art teachers asked their students to paint landscapes or faces or flowers, it was definitely a strange and special way of art education, but it gave a great joy to a kid.In 1994, when Murakami came to New York for the Guggenheim exhibition, it was the end of summer, and one sunny beautiful day we met in Central Park and walked and talked and talked. I had been worried that maybe my memory was wrong, and he may not be so tall or wear those odd glasses. But his face and his way of walking were exactly as before, only he now had white hair and a white camp-hat. Yet he looked so young and strong for his age, and always relaxed in any place. He told me that he was still teaching at my kindergarten and had some new offers from universities. We ate cool Japanese soba at my studio and talked about food, art, and Japan.My mother passed away when I was two and my brother was five. I was too young to understand the impact and have no recollection of the sadness or the shocking moments of this misfortune, but I remember that the color of the world around me had changed. I started to dream many red dreams. My brother took it very hard. Only to his art teacher would he open his heart, and Murakami became a mentor for him in many ways. Their relationship lasted until Murakami passed away.“Kay-chan” is what Murakami used to call me affectionately. He said I was really a jolly kid. Well, he didn’t know. After my mother’s death, I was determined to be very good and played the role of cheerleader of my family. The acting wasn’t so comfortable for me. After I left my country, I started to enjoy the freedom of just being myself.Creating movement has always been my prime interest, though choreography was not a distinct occupation in Japan in the 1960s or even in the 1970s. I left for England and enrolled in a dance school, the only one that offered a composition class at that time. They provided me with a full scholarship, but I hadn’t danced for many years, not since I was eight. So how I ended up in the dance world again is a mystery. I was just enjoying movement creation like I had enjoyed making those crazy paintings with Murakami in kindergarten. The well-known dance teacher Nesta Brooking, a former ballet mistress of the Royal Ballet who now had her own school, asked me how I could dare to make a dance piece without even knowing the name of a single step. I replied, “With an imagination.” I won the Cecchetti Society Award for my first and only ballet piece in England before I left for New York in 1977.In New York, I realized that it is not so easy to just say, “With an imagination.” I was overwhelmed to see and experience all the different kinds of dance style. And so many great dancers! How could I dare to ask them to dance for me when I don’t even look like a dancer? I decided to study all the styles of dance until I looked professional enough to impress some dancers, so they would allow me to create movements for them. In the late 1970s, the life-speed of New York artists was a flying madness. I choreographed and choreographed nonstop. Swallowing six vitamins and walking up six flights to the studio for rehearsal and up another six floors to my apartment and then collapsing—that was my life then. My works barely looked like ballet anymore nor any modern dance.One day I found myself confused with too much information from studying so many techniques. I stopped taking any classes and put myself in a small corner of the NYU gym for two years. During this period, the only movement class I took was a workshop offered by Simone Forti, which I’ve never forgotten. At the end of this session, I asked her one question: “What is your technique?” She answered me with a question: “What is a technique?”I have sought the answer to that, as well as to related questions such as: What is dance? What is bodily expression? What is existence and consciousness? I’ve started to create new works in a more improvisational approach with an exploration of texture, colors, and energy of organic and inorganic substances. It has gradually became clear to me that I’ve been creating three-dimensional painting in the space.I have not been interested in making visual art having left Murakami’s world, but I have always enjoyed seeing them in museums and galleries. Whenever I observe them, I feel a strong energy and some kind of emotional impact to my body. Sometimes I even feel jealous of the power these still images can offer, which really moves you from inside. There are a wide range of forms, styles, colors, textures, sizes, and all sorts of ideas behind them. These artists express themselves eagerly and boldly as if to prove their individualities without caring much about the technique or so. What freedom!In Japan before Gutai, nobody thought of art without a canvas.Is there any dance without a floor? Or even without a body? Or dance without movement? It sounds crazy now, but in the future it might be nothing unusual. I wish one day to make a dance that holds such freedom. As Gutai brought art close to the body, some dance can be close to visual art while still being presented as dance. After all, we all have our own bodies and minds to express our thoughts and feelings.Although the Gutai group eventually disbanded, my teacher Murakami kept working in the same direction by himself and kept teaching in the same kindergarten even after he stopped working as an art professor at universities. He liked the story of the naked beggar to whom the King offered any gift he desired. The beggar simply answered by asking the King to move a little bit from the place where he stands. The King was blocking the sun. Murakami may have thought: “We have a sun. Isn’t that enough for us?”Being an artist is always tough, especially in a city like New York where we may easily forget the basics. Freedom of expression is our sun. Individuality and originality are our bud. We need to let them grow. Gutai’s manifesto says: “Never imitate. Create what has never existed before. Let’s scream to the sun.”