Saburo Murakami

Passage, 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, Tokyo, 1956 A painter running his body through stretched sheets of kraft paper sounds simple, but Murakami's paper-breaking turned the act of making into the artwork itself, years before New York had a word for it. The torn frames were the leftover; the burst was the piece. He was working inside the Gutai group in postwar Japan, and the idea reportedly came from watching his toddler son crash through a paper sliding door at home. What survives is mostly a handful of striking photographs of the 1955 and 1956 versions, which is why so many people know the image without knowing the name.