The Japanese postwar painter Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008) liked to suspend himself from the ceiling with a rope, and then use his feet to spread paint across the canvas—which was positioned on the floor—in wildly expressive strokes. A member of the Gutai collective, his group attempted to incorporate the dynamism of life, the exhilarated energy of creation, into the painting. As Kazuo himself once said, in a nod to the American action painter Jackson Pollock, “I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion.” This is his first solo show in Tokyo. —E.C.