Kiyoshi Yamashita

Learning about Japanese Artist Kiyoshi Yamashita

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🎨March 10, 1922 Asakusa, Tokyo

🎨 Japanese painter

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🎨 Modern Contemporary

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🎨 Painting, Sculpture, Performance Art, and Installations

Facts

✅ Kiyoshi Yamashita was a Japanese Asian Modern & Contemporary artist who was born in 1922

✅ Yamashita was born in Asakusa, Tokyo. At the age of three, he suffered an acute abdominal disorder which, although not life-threatening, left him with a mild speech impediment and some neurological damage.

✅ He is famous for his wanderings throughout Japan, during which he often wore a sleeveless undershirt, garnering the nickname "The Naked General."

✅ Yamashita used the chigiri-e method of sticking torn pieces of coloured paper together to depict the scenery he saw on his travels,

✅ Possessing eidetic memory, Yamashita usually recreated the entire scene from memory when he returned to the institution or his home. Because of this, Yamashita is often considered an autistic savant.

✅ His work is still highly regarded throughout Japan, and is the subject of frequent exhibitions.

✅ His life was portrayed in a long-running Japanese television drama, Hadaka no Taishō Hōrōki (裸の大将放浪記, The Wandering Record of The Naked General), which ran from 1980 to 1997.

✅ Yamashita died from a cerebral hemorrhage aged 49