Hi Red Center’sShelter Plan(1964): The Uncanny Body in the Imperial Hotel

Abstract

This essay considers the relationship between the Japanese Fluxus-affiliated collective Hi Red Center’s performance event Shelter Plan (1964) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, in which the event was staged. In the year of the Tokyo Olympics and the heralding of the end of the post-war era for Japan, Shelter Plan, which involved the production of tailor-made bomb shelters, rejected the ideological function of the Tokyo Olympics, and the increasingly repressive political climate that accompanied it. I argue that Shelter Plan needs to be understood as a site-specific response to one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s major works. As successor to a lineage of hotels designed to house Western visitors in Japan, and imagined by Wright as an opportunity to bring the Japanese ‘off their knees’ and into modernity, the Imperial Hotel was a highly charged site for addressing the politics of intercultural exchange between Japan and the West.

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