At the end of the 1960s, an artistic trend emerged in Tokyo called mono-ha ("school of things"). Mono-ha was not a self-defined movement; the term was created in 1973 retroactively and with a pejorative connotation for the lack of work on the part of artists who, in the eyes of critics, were merely presenting objects. Unlike other anti-art tendencies, Mono-ha sought to reconfigure art by reducing objects to their original form. Materials and their properties were at the center of the art movement.
