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Born in 1946 in Osaka, Norio Imai studied under Jiro Yoshihara, founder of Gutai Art Association while attending high school. He was a member of the Gutai group from 1965 until 1972 when the group dissolved. His earliest solo exhibition was Testimony of a 17-Year-Old at Noonu Gallery, Osaka in 1964. The same year, as the youngest member of the Gutai group, he exhibited in the 14th Gutai Art Exhibition when he was 17. Imai’s range of practice include painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, and performance. Imai’s slides and films works of the 1960s and ’70s illustrate Imai’s testing of, and his interaction with the new medium of moving image, while his videos of the 1980s document his playful performances. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: Testimony of a 17-Year-Old (1964, Noonu Gallery, Osaka), 14th Gutai Art Exhibition (1964, Takashimaya Department Store, Osaka), From Space to Environment (1966, Ginza Matsuya Department Store, Tokyo), Fluorescent Chrysanthemum–Contemporary Japanese Art (1968, ICA, London), Gutai Group Display (1970, Midorikan Pavilion Entrance, Expo’70 World’s Fair, Suita, Osaka), 16th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (1970, Oberhausen, Germany), 10th Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition – Man and Nature (1971, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, followed by Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art), Image Expression ’72 - Equivalent Cinema (1972, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art), From Underground Cinema to Private Films (1978, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum), Norio Imai – Videotape Performance (1981, Video Gallery SCAN, Tokyo), Video Cocktail III (1986, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo), Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art 1968-1988 (2007, The Getty Center, Los Angeles), Vital Signals – Early Japanese and American Video Art (2009-2010, touring exhibition to Japan Society, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Yokohama Museum of Art; The National Museum of Art, Osaka and other locations), Gutai: Splendid Playground (2013, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), Severed Film / Jointed Film (2017, Gallery Joey Ramone, Rotterdam), White Event x moving images 1966 – 2016 (2016, Yumiko Chiba Associates viewing room Shinjuku), Norio Imai - Action on Film (2019, ARTCOURT Gallery, Osaka), among others.
