Gen’ichirō Inokuma is one of Japan’s leading modern artists, also known for designing Mitsukoshi’s iconic Hana Hiraku wrapping paper. Looking back across his career, one city emerges as a defining turning point in his artistic practice: New York.

From October 6, 2026, through January 10, 2027, Japan Society Gallery in New York will present Gen’ichirō Inokuma’s NYC Salon. Organized in collaboration with the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), the exhibition focuses on the two decades Inokuma spent living and working in New York City, from 1955 to 1975. It is also the first solo museum exhibition in New York City devoted to the Japanese modern artist.

Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA) | Photo by Yoshiro Masuda

What Inokuma encountered there was not simply a new artistic environment. He became part of an extraordinary cultural community that included Isamu Noguchi, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Charles and Ray Eames, among many others, while absorbing the energy of a city undergoing rapid transformation.

Through paintings, photographs, film footage, correspondence, design objects, ephemera, and personal artifacts, the exhibition traces Inokuma’s 20 years in New York while reconstructing the creative networks that surrounded him—revealing how his life and work intersected with many of the leading figures of the American avant-garde.

1955: Arrival in New York

Gen’ichirō Inokuma arrived in New York in 1955. He had originally left Japan intending to travel to Paris, but while crossing the United States, he was captivated by New York and decided to make the city his base.

Among the materials presented in the exhibition is a 1955 map on which Inokuma himself traced his journey from San Francisco to New York. Albums documenting the home at 115 East 95th Street, where he and Fumiko lived from 1957 to 1968, as well as photographs of his later studios, further reveal the physical settings of his New York life.

Gen’ichirō Inokuma, Haniwa II, 1956. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Japan Society Gallery. | Photo by Go Sugimoto

In 1956, the year after his arrival, Inokuma held his first New York solo exhibition at Willard Gallery. Gen’ichirō Inokuma’s NYC Salon brings together materials surrounding that exhibition, including its invitation, attendance records, an announcement sent to Japan Society members, and contemporary coverage in The New York Times.

Inokuma continued to exhibit at Willard Gallery in the years that followed. Works created and shown during his New York period—including White Hole (1960), Teenagers (1962), Snake Line and Black Circle (1964), Water Shores A (1970), and Landscape (1972)—are accompanied by photographs documenting the exhibitions in which they appeared.

Already an established artist in Japan, why did Inokuma cross the Pacific and spend two decades in New York? The exhibition approaches that question not only through his finished paintings, but through the places he inhabited and the things he saw. Reuniting works from his historic Willard Gallery exhibitions, it examines how New York’s architecture, urban landscape, and spirit of experimentation inspired a dramatic shift in his visual language, from earlier figurative compositions toward the bold abstractions that came to define his mature work.

The New York Inokuma Saw

Inokuma did more than paint in New York. Camera in hand, he walked through the city and documented the world around him.

His photographs capture the Empire State Building, Seagram Building, and Lever House. In 1958, he photographed the Guggenheim Museum while it was still under construction, as well as the old Pennsylvania Station; in 1961, his attention turned to the newly completed TWA Flight Center at what is now John F. Kennedy International Airport. Beyond celebrated architecture, his lens also found the surfaces of city walls and the textures of everyday New York.

His surviving 8mm films expand this visual record further, capturing Coney Island, snow-covered streets, the George Washington Bridge, and other scenes from mid-century Manhattan. The exhibition draws on this photographic archive and rarely seen film footage to reveal New York as an enduring source of artistic inspiration for Inokuma.

Gen’ichirō Inokuma, Untitled, 1967. The Hirose Family Collection, in memory of Dr. Teruo Hirose and Shigeko Masuda Hirose. | Photo by Go Sugimoto
Monumental architecture, skyscrapers glimpsed through windows, streets, walls, and the rhythms of everyday life: seeing these fragments of the city alongside paintings made during the same period allows us to consider how New York entered Inokuma’s use of color, line, and composition.

Rather than simply an artist who painted New York, Inokuma was an artist who continually reinvented his practice through the act of looking at New York. The exhibition allows us to retrace that gaze.

“Fumi Restaurant”: A Gathering Place for Artists

The “NYC Salon” of the exhibition’s title comes into focus through the community that grew around Inokuma and his wife, Fumiko.

Their New York home became a gathering place for artists and creative figures across nationalities and disciplines. The table around which they gathered eventually became known as “Fumi Restaurant.”

Fumiko’s 1956 address book contains the addresses of Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg, while the “Fumi Restaurant” guest book includes signatures by Isamu Noguchi and Jasper Johns. A photograph taken at a dinner in 1959 shows the Inokumas together with Sōfū Teshigahara, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Michel Tapié, and Shikō Munakata.

Gen’ichirō Inokuma, Cross, 1979. The Hirose Family Collection, in memory of Dr. Teruo Hirose and Shigeko Masuda Hirose. | Photo by Go Sugimoto
The network expands still further through the photographic archive. Merce Cunningham attended gatherings at the Inokumas’ apartment, while Inokuma photographed friends including John Cage, George Nakashima, and Isamu Noguchi. In 1964, Mark Rothko visited Inokuma’s solo exhibition at Willard Gallery, an encounter also preserved in a photograph included in the exhibition.

What emerges is more than a record of friendships with celebrated names. People from different countries gathered to eat, talk, see one another’s work, and exchange ideas. The Inokumas’ life in New York became a small but vibrant point of intersection within the city’s postwar cultural landscape.

As Japan Society describes it, these friendships fostered artistic exchange “across disciplines and national boundaries,” connecting visiting Japanese artists and architects with members of the American avant-garde.

Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Fumiko

One photograph offers a particularly intimate glimpse into these relationships.

Taken at Robert Rauschenberg’s studio on January 12, 1959, it shows Fumiko with Jasper Johns in front of Rauschenberg’s Wager, then still in progress. Another photograph records Fumiko assisting with the making of Monogram (1955–1959), one of Rauschenberg’s landmark works.

To understand the world surrounding Gen’ichirō Inokuma in New York is also to recognize the role played by Fumiko.

Gen’ichirō Inokuma, Green Highway, 1967. The Hirose Family Collection, in memory of Dr. Teruo Hirose and Shigeko Masuda Hirose. | Photo by Go Sugimoto
There is Alexander Calder’s 1970 portrait of Fumiko; correspondence sent to the Inokumas by Ray Eames; and Inokuma’s own photographs recording everyday moments with their friends.

Seen together, these materials suggest that “Inokuma’s New York” was not shaped by the artist alone. It was also a shared life and social space created with Fumiko—a place where relationships themselves became part of the creative environment.

Gen’ichirō Inokuma Beyond Painting

Although Inokuma is best known in Japan as a painter, his creative practice extended far beyond the canvas. In 1950, he designed Mitsukoshi’s Hana Hiraku wrapping paper, an enduring design that continues to bring his work into everyday life.

His activities in New York likewise crossed the boundaries between art and design.

Gen’ichirō Inokuma, Untitled, 1968. The Hirose Family Collection, in memory of Dr. Teruo Hirose and Shigeko Masuda Hirose. | Photo by Go Sugimoto
The exhibition includes a 1959 brochure promoting the Japanese tea ceremony, designed for the Consulate General of Japan in New York; a brochure and envelope produced for the 1960 USA-Japan Centennial celebration; and lacquered bamboo baskets sold at Bonniers in New York, together with related printed materials. Also preserved are Inokuma’s design proposals for a Japan Society logo.

His graphic and product design work reveals another dimension of his New York practice. As the exhibition notes, these projects also position Inokuma as an “unofficial cultural diplomat,” translating elements of Japanese culture through a modern visual language for audiences in the United States.

Painting, graphics, objects, space—and the creation of places where people could meet.

Seen across these different activities, creativity for Inokuma appears to have extended beyond the conventional boundaries of the painter’s profession and into the fabric of everyday life itself.

Rediscovering Gen’ichirō Inokuma in New York

In 1975, Inokuma left New York after approximately 20 years. Yet the experiences of those decades continued to resonate through his later practice.

There is particular significance, then, in an exhibition devoted to this period taking place not in Tokyo or Marugame, but in the city where he actually lived and worked.

Gen’ichirō Inokuma, Untitled, ca. 1966. The Hirose Family Collection, in memory of Dr. Teruo Hirose and Shigeko Masuda Hirose. | Photo by Go Sugimoto

Here was a Japanese artist who held his first New York solo exhibition at Willard Gallery in 1956; who walked the city and photographed its architecture; who welcomed artists into his home; who forged connections between people and cultures across the Pacific; and whose own visual language evolved as he witnessed New York itself changing around him.

Seventy years later, the exhibition looks beyond the paintings alone. By tracing the landscapes Inokuma saw, the rooms he inhabited, the conversations he shared, and the people he encountered, Gen’ichirō Inokuma’s NYC Salon brings into view both two decades in the life of one artist and the creative networks that animated New York from the 1950s through the 1970s.

In the words of Michele Bambling, Senior Director of Japan Society Gallery, New York was “a catalyst for artistic reinvention” for Inokuma, while the friendships he and Fumiko cultivated helped forge lasting connections between Japanese and American cultural communities.

Gen’ichirō Inokuma’s NYC Salon offers an opportunity to rediscover this Japanese modern artist within the city that transformed his practice—and within the international artistic community of which he became a part.