Takako Saito

was a Japanese visual artist closely associated with Fluxus, the international collective of avant-garde artists that was active primarily in the 1960s and 1970s. Saito contributed a number of performances and artworks to the movement, which continue to be exhibited in Fluxus exhibitions to the present day. She was also deeply involved in the production of Fluxus edition works during the height of their output, and worked closely with George Maciunas.

Saito is best known for her special chess sets, which include Spice Chess, but her larger body of work focuses on crafting a variety of objects to be used in open-ended situations that create unexpected social relations. More recent exhibitions, such as the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen's 2017-18 exhibition Takako Saito: You + Me, have focused on the way Saito uses a playful process-based approach focused on the making of objects to blend her artistic practice with the activities and chores of daily life. Despite the fact that this blended approach often results in ambiguous objects that sit between the experimental sentiments of fine art and the practical concerns of design, her works have been collected by major museums and public collections across Europe, the United States, and Japan. The majority of her exhibitions have been held in Europe, where she traveled to and lived from 1968 on, including during the later period of her life when she resided in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Life and career

Early life and education Saito was born in 1929 in Sabae-Shi, Fukui Province in Japan to a wealthy landholding family. As the second daughter among three siblings, she had a relatively free childhood for her position. In her middle school years, during WWII, she and her classmates were put to work in a factory that produced military parachutes. Saito's job was to spin threads into rolls, an activity that bears some resemblance to her later artmaking processes. After the war, the post-WWII land reforms enacted under the GHQ left her family with limited financial resources. When her father died in 1947, her mother became more rigid creating a rift between Saito and her family that would eventually lead her to live abroad. Founded 1952 by Teijirō Kubo, the movement focused on encouraging free will through creative expression and experimentation. Through this movement Saito began studying various artistic media including oil painting, sculpture, printmaking, and watercolor. While attending a summer camp organized by the movement, Saito met Ay-O, an artist actively engaged in avant-garde groups in Japan, such as Demokurāto Bijutsuka Kyōkai (Democratic Artists Association). Through Ay-O, Saito learned about the avant-garde, first in Tokyo, and then, after he moved in 1958, in New York City. Saito was also briefly involved in the communal Fluxus dinners Maciunas hoped to hold as part of the broader communal ideal of Fluxus. As Fluxus member Mieko Shiomi recalled:After a while, Maciunas proposed having dinner together every evening. In his opinion, buying food for many was more economical than buying for one... He called it Flux Dinner Commune. So George, Paik, Takako, Shigeko and I started this part-time collective life. For the first few days, the men went shopping and the girls cooked. However we found it inconvenient, because George came back rather late from his office and then often didn't buy what we wanted to cook.... It didn't last long, because we got jobs at night. George was discouraged, but bravely said, "Well, work comes first, dinner second." Although Saito remained a part of the Fluxus movement throughout the 1960s and '70s, for her it was only one means of exploring her artistic commitment. She further expanded her experience through classes at New York University in summer 1964, the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1964 to 1966, and the Art Students League from 1966 to 1968, although these also served as justification for her continued visa.

Thus even after leaving New York, Saito continued her Fluxus connections, producing multi-media installations and sculptural work in collaboration with other Fluxus artists such as Robert Filliou, George Brecht, Dorothy Iannone, Gerhard Rühm, Ben Vautier, Dick Higgins, and Bob Watts. Saito contributed pieces to many Fluxus collaborations, including Fluxus 1 (1964) and the Flux Cabinet (1975–77). Her later pieces maintain the Fluxus ideal of eroding the boundaries between performer and viewer, but, as art historian Dieter Daniels argues, they play with the traditional idea of the dissolution of authorship by combining obvious craftsmanship of objects with an open-ended collaboration through the use and exchange of these objects. Beyond the gallery setting, however, her practice extended to the entirety of her living situation. She handmade her clothing, furniture, and other items for daily use in her Düsseldorf studio, embodying in her daily life a concrete recognition of the labor and craft of living. Daniels notes that while her work is often compared to that of Marcel Duchamp, given Duchamp's focus on the readymade as an escape from labor and his claim for the right to be lazy, Saito comes across as more self-aware of the various forms that labor and craft can take and the relations this investment creates when objects are left available for open exchange.

Death Saito died on 30 September 2025, at the age of 96.

Chess sets Saito is perhaps best known for the various special chess sets she created over the years. These were often included in the Flux Boxes from 1964 onwards, sometimes in uncredited form, and were part of a Fluxus series of game variations of Chess.

George Maciunas was fascinated by Japanese craftsmanship and owned some Japanese boxes. He associated this craftsmanship with Japanese culture, and when he began working with Saito, he was so impressed with her craftmanship, in spite of her self-taught skills, that he asked her to contribute a series of disrupted chess sets to sell in his new Flux shop on Canal Street in Soho. Maciunas was so delighted by Spice Chess in particular that he "even took credit for it on occasion." While many have noted the relation between Duchamp's interest in chess, art historian Claudia Mesch points out that many of the Fluxchess sets deny the zero-sum win-or-lose social dynamics of chess in which Duchamp was engaged, and thereby subvert the "masculinist cold war metaphors" of chess. In Saito's case, she argues this is accomplished by reorienting the experience of chess to combine the analytical with the sensorial. For Lushetich, the effect is to temporalize the experience of chess play and enhance the material sense of the physical set as well as the action of play. In so doing, she argues that players change their game play strategies and goals, thereby shifting the nature of the social interaction realized through the game set. Grinder Chess (1965) Book Chess (1980s)

You + Me, Kelter-Kabinett / Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Germany, 2016

CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, France

Fondazione Bonotto, Vincenza, Italy

Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne Métropole, France

[mac] musée d'art contemporain, Montreal, Quebec

Musée d'arts de Nantes, France

Centre nationale des arts plastiques, Paris La Défense, France

Musée nationale d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Musée d'art modern et contemporain – Strasbourg, France

The British Museum, London, UK

The Museum of Modern Art, NY

MUMOK Wien, Austria

museum FLUXUS+, Potsdam, Germany

ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany

Kunstsammlung Maria und Walter Schnepel, Bremen, Germany

Detroit Institute of Arts (Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection), MI, US

Getty Research Institute (Archive of Emmett Williams), Los Angeles, US

Itami City Museum of Art, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan

The National Museum of Art Osaka, Japan

Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, US

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, US

Emily Harvey Foundation, NY, US

Archives of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain

Collection of Artists' Books at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, US