In São Paulo in the 1930s, Japanese immigrant artists gathered around the Seibi-Kai arts association founded by Tomoo Handa (1906–96) in 1935. One of them, Kiyoji Tomioka (1894–1985), had depicted the façade of an 18th-century colonial chapel in São Paulo’s historic Liberdade neighborhood, known as the Capela dos Aflitos (Chapel of the Afflicted), in a 1928 watercolor. It was in the neighborhood of the chapel that Seibi-Kai held its first group exhibition in 1938, in the salon of a nearby community club. Tomioka’s watercolor, titled Rua dos Aflitos (Street of the Afflicted), entered the collection of Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2008, making it the oldest work by a Japanese-Brazilian artist to be held by a Brazilian art museum.

Before Mabe’s rise to fame, Seibi-Kai was a vital catalyst in enabling Japanese-Brazilian artists’ integration into the local arts circuit. Artists in the association were part of a working-class milieu of painters, mostly self-taught or formed in the local art-school infrastructure, who sought to improve their artistic practice by fostering exchanges between artists and refusing to follow the rules of academic training. They gathered outdoors, traveled together to paint landscapes, organized exhibitions, and participated in similar sessions organized by other artists’ groups in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, including Grupo Santa Helena and Núcleo Bernardeli in the 1930s and ’40s, and Grupo Guanabara in the 1950s. They supported one another while working day jobs to sustain their artistic practices in the face of economic hardship, making modern art more accessible beyond the elitist circles of Brazil’s 1920s generation of modernists.

During the 1950s, São Paulo’s arts scene grew more international, propelled by the foundation of the Bienal de São Paulo in 1951, as well as of art museums such as the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 1947, and the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP) in 1948. Seibi-Kai artists showcased their works in both the Bienal and the group’s own annual salons, of which fourteen iterations were held between 1952 and 1970, when the group dissolved. The encounters and exchanges engendered by these activities helped make Seibi-Kai a hub in the transcultural constellations of postwar abstract art. In particular, artists in the group stood at the forefront of Informal abstraction in Brazil, a mode of painting that looked to European Art Informel, as well as to the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School. The Japanese-Brazilian painters, however, also drew inspiration from Japanese calligraphic modernism, bringing a distinct perspective to the conversation.

Seibi-Kai artists met with artists from Japan’s delegations to the Bienal de São Paulo since its inauguration in 1951. Shiró became the first artist to present Informalist abstract works in the context of Brazil’s national representation at the biennial in 1957, when the event also included works by the Spanish Informalist painter Antoni Tapiés (1923–2012) and a retrospective of Jackson Pollock (1912–56). Japan’s representation that year featured calligraphic abstractions by painter Waichi Tsutaka (1911–95) and avant-garde calligraphers Yuichi Inoue (1916–85) and Yukei Teshima (1901–87). Those works provide part of the context for Mabe’s calligraphic turn that same year, before he claimed the prize in the following edition. Tomie Ohtake (1913–2015), who began experimenting with abstraction in 1953, started her series of gestural “blind paintings” in 1959—a blindfolded dive into Informalism that lasted only a few years, after which she turned to irregular geometric forms. Tsutaka appears to have met Mabe and Ohtake in 1957 or 1959, as he wrote a letter to both of them to introduce Japanese artist Kazuo Wakabayashi (1931–2021), who arrived as an immigrant in Brazil in 1961.

Wakabayashi’s arrival was part of a new wave of Japanese artists who relocated to São Paulo in the 1960s in search of a congenial environment for their practices and were often welcomed by Seibi-Kai members. These artists, inspired by São Paulo’s effervescent cultural scene and the work of its established Japanese-diasporic artistic community, quickly integrated into its newly internationalized scene through their connections to the association. The New York-based Japanese Conceptual artist On Kawara registered their presence in his I Met lists in 1969, ten years after Mabe’s triumph, when Kawara visited São Paulo during a trip to Latin America. The lists include Wakabayashi, Sachiko Koshikoku (1937–2019), Bin Kondo (b. 1937), and Tomoshige Kusuno (b. 1935), all of whom had arrived in Brazil earlier in the decade.

The activities of the Seibi-Kai artists also extended beyond Brazil to other locations in South America. Shin Kurihara (1894–1966), the commissioner for Japan for the 1957 Bienal de São Paulo, later traveled to Bolivia and Peru with the Seibi-Kai founder Tomoo Handa. In Lima, they painted and exhibited their work, connecting with Japanese-Peruvians, including Yoshitaro Amano (1898–1982), a collector of Chancay artifacts who later founded the Amano Museum of Pre-Columbian Textiles. In the early 1970s, after the dissolution of Seibi-Kai, Japanese-Brazilian painters Yuji Tamaki (1916–79) and Massao Okinaka (1913–2000) also went together to Bolivia and Peru, where they painted landscapes and Inca ruins. On separate occasions during the same period, Koshikoku and ceramist Akinori Nakatani (1943–2023) met with Amano in Lima and visited his collection. The impact of pre-Columbian geometries on their work became evident in São Paulo in the years that followed

Both Ishikawa and Okumura embraced New Figuration painting during the 1960s and went on to engage with Conceptual and spatial practices in the 1970s. Ishikawa began to use photocopiers during the Military Dictatorship’s most repressive period, the “Years of Lead” (1968–74), to produce politically infused works that could be distributed by mail or passed on by hand. Okumura created site-specific installations with her collaborators Francisco Iñarra (1947–2009) and Genilson Soares (b. 1943) in the artist collective Equipe3, formed in 1970. She moved to New York City in 1974 on a scholarship and became the first Brazilian artist to be acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978. Perhaps most interestingly, Okumura took part in two significant events in the city: the exhibition Dialects of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States in 1980 at the A.I.R. Gallery, and the panel discussion Eye to Eye in 1983 at what would become the Asian American Arts Centre. Her presence in the exhibition and on the panel helped connect her with the diasporic networks that shaped New York’s cultural scene at the time.