Hyperart: Thomasson

by Genpei Akasegawa

416pp | 2010 / revised edition June 2025 | Paperback | ISBN 9781885030788

Pre-order revised edition here, forthcoming spring 2025. 

We are releasing an updated version of this book! In this revised edition, Matthew Fargo’s original US translation of Akasegawa’s hilarious, brilliantly conceived exercise in collective observation is accompanied by reflections from noted scholars Jordan Sand and Reiko Tomii, as well as a new essay by Akasegawa scholar William Marotti and a reflection on Akasegawa’s legacy as a teacher by writer, artist, and composer Masayuki Qusumi, a former student of Akasegawa’s.

Have you ever seen a Thomasson? That doorknob in a wall without a door, that driveway leading into an unbroken fence, that strange concrete … thing sprouting out of your sidewalk with no discernible purpose. Have you ever puzzled over its strangeness, or stopped to marvel at its useless beauty?

In the 1970s Tokyo, artist Akasegawa Genpei and his friends began noticing what they termed “hyperart,” aesthetic objects created by removing a structure’s function, while carefully maintaining the structure itself. They called these objects “Thomassons,” after an American pinch-hitter recruited by a Japanese baseball team, whose bat never connected with a ball.

In the 1980s, through submissions from students and readers, Akasegawa collected and printed photos of Thomassons in a column in Super Photo Magazine. He wrote these columns with a warm, goofy humor that seems intended to cast back nihilism, irony, and other common responses to 20th century urbanization. What emerged was a lighthearted, yet profound, picture of how modernization was changing Japan’s urban landscape, and the culture that underpinned it.

These columns, collected into a book, became a cult hit among late-eighties Japanese youth. What they saw in this assemblage of casual photos and humorous descriptions was, as essayist Jordan Sand puts it, “a way of regaining some sense of the human imprint on the city in an era when that imprint was being rapidly erased.”

praise

“Mr. Akasegawa is the kind of artist who inspires everybody every time he makes a new piece of art.”
— Yoko Ono

“Why is the city always laughing at us behind our backs? Akasegawa, of course, knows the answer, but prefers to keep us prisoners of his enigma…” — Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians

“An indispensable, hilarious, and faux-naïve map of postwar Japan, conceptual art making, and exactly that point in the ’70s where Western consumerist culture collapses into unapologetic simulacra. Let this witty master of resistance usher you onwards to genuinely useful modes of higher observation … until one sees and knows only the startlingly different.” — Michael Light, author of Full Moon and 100 Suns