Joan Jonas

The exhibition, which includes works that were created during her previous travels in Japan, will be presented ahead of Japanese Contemporary Art and the World 1989-2010, a survey featuring a video installation by the artist, which will open at the National Art Center Tokyo in September.

Born in New York in 1936, Jonas is a major figure in video and performance art, though she trained as a sculptor and nurtured a multidisciplinary practice also encompassing installation and drawing. She rose to prominence in New York’s downtown scene during the 1960s and 1970s, a hotbed of creative experimentation where artists, dancers, choreographers, and musicians—including Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and John Cage—were working in dialogue. It was in this environment that Jonas began to create performances incorporating not only costumes, props, and scripts, but also music, dance, sculpture, and installation.

During a trip to Japan in 1970, Jonas purchased a portable video camera, the Sony Portapak. When she returned to New York, she produced her first performances on video, Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy and Vertical Roll (both 1972), posing radical questions about perception, selfhood, identity, and the human body and its recorded image. Over the course of more than five decades, she has continued to explore technology’s strange power to change how we see ourselves and the world around us, drawing from a wide range of sources— including literature, art history, mythology, animals and nature, and Noh and Kabuki theater—for her boundary-pushing work.

Jonas has been traveling to and exhibiting in Japan for much of her career, absorbing the art, culture, and traditions she encountered there into her own practice. The earliest presentation of her work in the country took place in 1981 at the Tokyo Film Festival. Since then, she has mounted solo exhibitions at Wako Works of Art in Tokyo, Kyoto City University of Arts Art Gallery, and the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu. Several bodies of drawings in Jonas’s exhibition at Pace were made during her residency at CCA Kitakyushu in 2013. In 2019, Jonas was awarded the Kyoto Prize, which is bestowed upon individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind.

Pace’s exhibition of Jonas’s work in Tokyo will celebrate her relationship to Japan and situate her drawing practice within the historical lineage of modernist abstraction. The presentation will bring together some 80 drawings, selected by Pendleton, which the artist made between the 1970s and the 2010s. Together, these works will speak not only to the importance of drawing in Jonas’s performance practice, but also to her abiding engagement with animals and the natural world as a source of inspiration.

The works on view will include selections from Jonas’s Body Drawings, which she produced as part of various performances over the last 20 years. Created using large sheets of Japanese paper—a material she first encountered during her travels in the 1970s—these auto-reflexive compositions are material indices of the movements of Jonas’s body, collapsing representation and registration into a single moment of gestural abstraction.

The show will also feature the artist’s drawings of rabbits, which emerged from her longstanding interest in the Japanese myth of the rabbit in the moon. These drawings are directly connected to her video installation Double Lunar Rabbit (2010), which will be on view in the upcoming group exhibition at the National Art Center Tokyo in September 2025. In these works, rendered in paint on paper, Jonas uses expressive, calligraphic marks to represent the rabbit’s body, exploring how quickly she can develop an image without it falling apart.

Prior to her residency in Japan in 2013, Jonas found “a Japanese dictionary of fish” in a second-hand store in San Diego. “I carried it around with me and copied the very detailed color renditions of all the different fish,” she recalled. During her residency in Kitakyushu, she created 100 of these works, developing them into an extensive series of drawings in blue ink, part of which will be on view in her exhibition at Pace Tokyo, a reminder of the central role of fish in Japanese culture and history.

The exhibition will also include two distinct bodies of bird drawings—one of semi-abstract bird forms in black oil stick and another of closely observed, colorful studies of specific species—alongside the rabbit and fish works. Jonas imbues each of her more detailed zoological images of birds with idiosyncratic traits and quirks, creating personality portraits reflecting the intelligence, subjectivity, and animating spirit of nature.

A professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonas is represented in major museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate in London, among others. In 2024, MoMA presented a critically acclaimed retrospective of Jonas’s work, titled Good Night Good Morning, which coincided with a sprawling exhibition of her works on paper at The Drawing Center in New York. Also in 2024, the artist was awarded the Nam June Paik Prize, bestowed upon artists who have contributed to the development of contemporary art, mutual understanding, and world peace—Jonas will open her first solo exhibition in Korea at the Nam June Paik Art Center in November 2025. In recent years, she has also presented solo exhibitions at Dia Beacon in New York, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional in Madrid, Haus der Kunst in Munich, and Gladstone Gallery in Seoul and New York.