On September 30, Takako Saito, a Japanese artist associated with the Fluxus movement, passed away at her home in Düsseldorf, Germany, aged 96. A trailblazing figure in the avant-garde art scenes of Tokyo and New York during the early 1960s, she leaves behind an expansive body of work that playfully blurs the boundaries between art and everyday life through ordinary objects, recipe books, performances, clothing, and installations.

Born in 1929 in Sabae City, Fukui prefecture, Saito originally trained in child psychology and worked as a middle school teacher before devoting herself full-time to art in her 20s. Her artistic endeavors began in 1953, when she was first introduced to the Sōzō Biiku Undo (Sōbi) movement founded by Teijirō Kubo, which encouraged artistic creativity among educators and students. Through this initiative, Saito encountered various influential Japanese artists like Ay-O, with whom she had a lifelong friendship that significantly shaped her career.

From 1961 to 1963, Saito lived in Tokyo before relocating to New York. Here, she became actively involved in the Fluxus community, led by George Maciunas, alongside international artists, poets, and musicians. During her four years in New York, Saito played a fundamental role in the group’s projects, and formed close ties with Maciunas and peers such as artist-writer Alison Knowles. Aside from developing her own works—including her famed chess sets, for which she replaced the standard pieces with objects such as spice grinders, vials of liquid scents, and nuts and bolts—Saito assisted in producing Fluxus art events and contributed to the collective’s recreational activities by cooking meals known as “dinner communes.”

In the mid-1960s, Saito began to incorporate sound and performance in her work, exploring concepts of music and games. Her first public performances emerged in the early 1970s, centering on audience interaction—in Kicking Box Billiard (1971), for example, she invited viewers to play with paper cubes. After leaving New York, she spent a decade traveling before settling in Düsseldorf in 1978, where she founded her own publishing house, Noodle Editions, the following year.

Saito dedicated herself to her artistic practice up until her final days. Her most recent solo exhibition, “It’s All Play,” which opened just two weeks after her passing at Frac Lorraine in Metz, demonstrates her unwavering commitment to experimental, socially engaged art.

Yuqian Fan is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.