Artist Profile - Masanori Oe

Lee Stabert introduces Masanori Ōe, a key artist for our Community of Images exhibition and for counterculture filmmaking in both the US and Japan. A filmmaker, writer, and translator, he was a young man when he left Japan for New York City in the mid-1960s.

Masanori Oe’s father was a woodcarver, creating pieces for traditional Bunraku puppet theater. After a childhood of war and occupation in Japan, that medium didn’t compel the young artist.

“Also I felt at the time—I feel differently now, I should say—that it seemed lacking in imagination: just doing the exact same puppet show again and again. There was no possibility for creativity, just an endless repeating of one pattern or form,” he explained during a series of interviews at his mountaintop home for Andy Couturier’s book A Different Kind of Luxury: Japanese Lessons in Simple Living and Inner Abundance. “I wanted to seek my own expression in the outside world…I got interested in making movies after I was exposed to underground film, Bergman and French New Wave cinema.”

Image: From Masanori Oe’s Head Game (1967). ©Masanori Oe.

That hunger for the outside world would lead Oe away from his small town of Shikoku to art school in Kyoto. He wanted to pursue his passion for independent film, but there was no access to 16 mm cameras in Japan. There was also the issue of getting a passport — during the postwar period, international travel for Japanese citizens was severely restricted. After the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, things started to open up. The young artist worked a day job to save up for his plane ticket. He arrived in the U.S. in 1965.

“I wanted to seek my own expression in the outside world...”

It didn’t take long for the world of the New York avant-garde to make an impression. In A Different Kind of Luxury, Oe recalls his very first night in the city.

“A woman I had just met said, ‘There’s a psychedelic party tonight; everyone’s going.’ And they invited me along,” he said. “At that party I met Timothy Leary—although I didn’t know who he was at the time—who was doing his experimentation with LSD and psychedelics.”

Oe threw himself into the creative culture there and into the Lower East Side avant-garde film scene in particular, filming antiwar and civil rights protests as part of the Newsreel Collective and capturing his psychedelic experiences in a series of films.

According to Ignacio Adriasola, an art historian specializing in the experimental art and photography of 1960s Japan, Oe’s wide-ranging formal experimentation “drew implicit parallels between altered states of consciousness and the ecstatic experience found in protest. Pursuing an aesthetics of ecstasy in his work, Oe probed film’s potential for collective mind-expansion and social transformation.”

Oe’s community of filmmakers was originally based around teacher Bob Lowe in a run-down building on the Lower East Side. According to Oe’s collaborator Marvin Fishman, they called it “The Third World Film Studio” because of the diversity of the group, which included “me as a white Jewish kid, two people from Venezuela and one from Chile, a woman who was from an aristocratic family in the southern U.S., a man from India, and a Puerto Rican street kid named Angel who we took in.”

Image: From Masanori Oe’s Great Society (1967). ©Masanori Oe.

In 1967, CBS commissioned Oe and Fishman to create Great Society, a six-screen collage of newsreel footage. The piece featured images of soldiers marching, the JFK and Oswald assassinations, ‘60s fashion, NASA, civilian casualties in Vietnam, fighter jets dropping bombs, and politicians speechifying.

During his time with Oe, Couturier screened the film.

“When the lights come back on, I am transformed,” he writes. “Only sixteen minutes. The film is a masterpiece, and everyone in the room knows it. None of us can speak. He’s captured the overlapping movements: a new spiritual consciousness not separate from the very political, antiwar immediacy of the moment.”

“Only sixteen minutes. The film is a masterpiece, and everyone in the room knows it.”

According to Oe, CBS refused to re-air the film and affiliates threatened to leave the network.

Oe’s career evolved after he returned from America. He translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead, along with other Hindu and Buddhist texts, and wrote extensively on his psychedelic experiences, which went far beyond LSD to include yoga and meditation. He helped to found one of the first health food stores in Japan and became an organic farmer, collaborating on the first Japanese version of the Whole Earth Catalog. His works have recently been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.

While Oe moved on to other mediums, the essential questions explored in his work have remained the same. Here is how he explained it to Couturier:

“Whatever medium I used, I was pursuing the same theme: ‘Who am I? Where from, where to?’ I simply tried to find the best tool, the easiest-to-use tool at the time to go deeper. So that could be flower arranging, or tea ceremony, or it could be words. Before movies it had been sculpture. The medium doesn’t matter so much.”