Japanese group of artists, active in Tokyo from 1923 to 1925. The most important figure in the formation of the group was TOMOYOSHI MURAYAMA, who met Hewarth Walden in Berlin in 1922 and became associated with Constructivism and other European avant-garde movements. He exhibited at the Erste Internationale Kunstausstellung at the Haus Leonard Tietz, Düsseldorf, and participated in the first Kongress des Internationalen Fortschrittlichen Künstler, before returning to Japan in January 1923 in an attempt to establish a new arts movement there. The leading avant-garde groups active in Tokyo at that time were the Futurist Art Society (Miraiha Bijutsu Kyokai), which was greatly influenced by David Burlyuk, and the Action group, in which Tai Kanbara was involved. Murayama became acquainted with several members of the Futurist Art Society, including Masamu Yanase (1900–45), Kamenosuke Ogata (1900–42), Shuzo Oura and Kunio Kadowaki, and together they formed the Mavo group. The group’s activities had a strong Dadaist character and were intended to provoke and disturb. In July 1923 at their first group exhibition they issued a manifesto declaring: ‘We will be the avant-garde forever. We are not restrained. We are radical. We are revolutionizing.’ Other artists later joined, but few of the group’s works remain, other than Yanase’s A Morning in May and myself before Breakfast (1923: Tokyo, priv. col.), which uses flat surfaces, and a number of works in which printed matter, hair and other objets trouvés are pasted to the surface, and some three-dimensional compositions. In 1924 several members of the group left to form the Three Division Society (Sanka), which disbanded, however, in 1925 after two exhibitions, partly as a result of the anarchic tendencies that characterized both groups.

• MAVO
  • Japan, §VI, 5(v)(a): Avant-garde painting, c 1910–45
  • Murayama, Tomoyoshi