Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue
electric dress
Atsuko Tanaka wearing her artwork electric dress, suspended from the temporary beam at the 2nd gutai art exhibition, 1956, ohara kaikan hall, tokyo, copyright kanayama akira and tanaka atsuko association
ATSUKO TANAKA
A member of the Japanese avant-garde art movement Gutai, the painter and performance artist Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) created in 1956 her Electric Dress (Denkifuku), weighing 50 kilos and made of 200 colorful, blinking lights. This obscure yet iconic artwork prefigured performance and feminist art, as well as conceptual fashion. By covering herself with an armature of neons, light bulbs, and wires, Tanaka expressed an ambivalent fascination and repulsion with the technological evolution in postwar Japan.
