was one of the most important postwar Japanese artists. Takamatsu used photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and performance to fundamentally investigate the philosophical and material conditions of art. Takamatsu's practice was dedicated to the critique of cognition and perception, through the rendering and variation of morphological devices, such as shadow, tautology, appropriation, perceptual and perspective distortion and representation. Takamatsu's conceptual work can be understood through his notions of the Zero Dimension, which renders an object or form to observe its fundamental geometrical components. Takamatsu isolated these smallest constituent elements, asserting that these elements produce reality, or existence. For Takamatsu the elementary particle represents “the ultimate of division” and also “emptiness itself,” like the a line within a painting—there appears to be nothing more beyond the line itself. Yet, Takamatsu's end goal was not to just prove the presence or object-ness of these elements, but rather used them as a way to challenge and prove the limits of human perception, leading to his fixation on “absence” or the things that are unobservable. The impact of Takamatsu's practice also has to be considered in terms of his contributions to the avant garde art scenes through his individual practice and work with collectives, as well as the legibility of his work in the discourse of conceptual art and thus the broader international art world. Biography Early life and education Takamatsu was born in Tokyo in 1936. From 1954 to 1958, he attended Tokyo University of the Arts, where he majored in oil painting and was a classmate of his future Hi-Red Center member Natsuyuki Nakanishi. As part of his coursework, Takamatsu studied the beginnings of pictorial modernities spanning Sesshū Tōyō to Paul Cézanne (as noted in his writings). Duncan Wooldridge has argued that Takamtsu's interest in both modern Western and Japanese art histories allows us to understand his work as a crucial meeting point between culturally coded conventions, as well as his later success as a Japanese artists at the forefront of the movement towards international contemporaneity. Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition (1958-63) After graduation, Takamatsu began showing paintings at the raucous and unjuried Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition. Sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper between 1949 and 1963 and held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, this annual exhibition was modeled after the French Salon des Artistes Indépendants. Takamatsu formed his network of anti-establishment artists at the Yomiuri Indépendant, which became a site of exploration and experimentation