Vitrine: Art as an International Language
Above right, Brain Cell by Ryosuke Cohen.


Mark Bloch (b. 1956) began his postal art network in 1978, calling it PAN (Postal Art Network), after studying traditional art forms, and then, performance, and video art with the American visual artist, Joan Jonas (b. 1936), and the Japanese filmmaker, Taka Iimura(1937-2022)at the Kent State University in Ohio. He became one of the central figures in the mail art movement after moving to New York City in 1982.

The exhibition, “Panmodern!,” at the NYU’s Special Collections Center in the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library showcases the original mail art sent to Bloch in New York City over four decades, featuring objects, envelopes, publications, and postcards. In 2005, Bloch donated some of his collection of mail art from his network to the New York University’s Downtown Collection. They now hold a thorough snapshot of the international correspondence network from the 1980s when mail art was thriving in one of its many golden ages. The collection spans over 40 linear feet and fills 56 boxes in the library.

Bloch says, “Mail art is often categorized separately from the art world as a marketplace, due to its pure, childlike gifting, and rule-breaking attitude. However, I believe it could be brought back into the art world which is now oriented more towards social art.” He has written extensively about groups such as General Idea and The Image Bank, both Canadian groups of mail artists that preceded his time in the network. Bloch’s theory is that the New York Correspondence School founded by Ray Johnson in the mid-1950s began as a subset of the art world but slowly developed into an independent offshoot with its own aesthetics, styles, rules, and norms. He explores some of that in his NYU show. 

Vitrine: Superstars and Precursors
A festival by Bloch honoring the Italian mail artist, Cavellini was held in three venues in New York, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2014.

Mail art had already been practiced broadly by the avant-garde artists worldwide for over a century before Mark Bloch’s involvement. 

The Italian Futurists, such as Gino Severini (1883-1966), used the postal system to create a robust exchange of postal ephemera in the earliest days of the 20th century. 

Then, a century ago in Europe, the Dadaists,  including Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), used mail art as part of their exploration of ready-made objects and absurdist humor. Duchamp’s postcard, “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1919), which was a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee drawn on it, is a classic example of Dada’s irreverence. By mailing this postcard to friends, Duchamp subverted the traditional reverence for iconic art and mocked conventional beauty standards. According to Bloch, he also mailed language games on postcards to his next-door neighbor, who happened to be an art collector. 

Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), a poet and the co-founder of the Dada movement, played a key role in organizing Dada’s early activities. He used mail art to collect and distribute the Dada manifestos, absurdist writings, and visual materials, bypassing traditional publishing methods to spread the movement’s subversive message to a wider audience.

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), a German Dadaist known for his Merz collages, also embraced mail. Incorporating into his work the found objects, including pieces of mail and postage stamps, Schwitters blurred the boundary between personal correspondence and artistic expression, sending visual art and stationary to fellow Dadaists in the early stages of mail art’s evolution.

In early contemporary art history, Ray Johnson (1927–1995), a seminal figure of Pre-Pop and Neo-Dada, developed the mail art network known as the New York Correspondence School, of which Mark Bloch was later a member. Johnson is often credited as the “father” of mail art.

This international art movement has included Japanese artists. During the 1960s and the 70s, mail art became a popular medium for Fluxus artists, as it allowed them to create and distribute art outside of the traditional gallery system, democratizing art and communication. Though more widely known for her conceptual art and performances, Yoko Ono (b. 1933) also contributed to mail art as a part of her involvement in Fluxus. Her instructional pieces and “event scores,” which invited the recipients to perform simple actions or participate in everyday activities, were sometimes sent through the mail as part of Fluxus projects. One of the most famous collections of her event scores is her 1964 book titled, “Grapefruit”. Bloch says “Mieko Shiomi (b.1938) was probably the greatest Fluxus artist to use the mail in her nine ‘Spatial Poem’ projects, which began in 1965. They were all organized and distributed using the mail. They are my favorite!”. 

Nam June Paik (1932–2006), the Korean pioneer of video art but who worked closely with Japanese artists, also participated in mail art, using the postal system to distribute small conceptual works, such as altered postcards or pieces that reflected his interest in communication technology and the intersection of media and art. It was Paik who called Ray Johnson the first Communications Artist. 

In response to this global art movement, On Kawara (1932–2014), a prominent conceptual artist based in New York, incorporated mail art into his minimalist practice exploring the themes of time, existence, and daily life. His mail art works, in particular the series, “I Got Up” (1968–1979) and “I Am Still Alive” (1970–1979), became an essential part of his artistic expression, using daily correspondence to reflect on the passage of time and the human presence.

Shozo Shimamoto (1928–2013), formerly a leading figure in the Gutai movement in Osaka, Japan, became involved in mail art during the 1970s and the 80s, when the form was gaining popularity among post conceptual and younger avant-garde artists. The mail art movement aligned with his philosophy of “communication as art,” which sought to use art as a means of connecting people across geographic, cultural, and political boundaries. Like other mail artists, Shimamoto used the postal system as a medium for artistic expression, sending collages, letters, objects, and visual experiments to other artists around the world. His works were often participatory and interactive, encouraging the recipients to engage with and sometimes contribute to the piece.

Mark Bloch executed “Pan Japan” on Shimamoto’s Head as a part of Shimamoto’s Art Networking on the Head.

Shimamoto interacted with Ray Johnson and Mark Bloch and hundreds of other artists internationally, exchanging mail art pieces that contributed to the global community of artists, using the postal system as a platform for artistic dialogue. Their works often featured collages, stamps, cut-outs, and handwritten or typed-out messages, embodying the decentralized and anti-hierarchical nature of mail art. During his visit to New York in the year 1987, Bloch executed “Pan Japan” as a part of “Art Networking on the Head,” a signature work by Shimamoto. 

“In 1987, Shozo Shimamoto brought an entourage to the United States for a little tour. He had his protégé Ryosuke Cohen with him, who went on to become quite accomplished in his own right as the publisher of the Brain Cell series, which he is still doing… We had a little soiree at the home of Kim Depole, an American artist who was also in correspondence with them at the time. We went to a store called Little Ricky on lower First Avenue, where they had a Photo Booth machine, and took lots of photo booth images. That was when I wrote ‘Pan Japan’ on Shozo’s bald head with a thick black magic marker. Shozo was doing lots of ‘Art Networking on the Head,’ as he called it. He was on the cover of the Flash Art magazine with a woman in a swimsuit, sitting on his head, in those days,” Bloch recalls. 

Panmag 19, 1987, page 10-11. Bloch started issuing Panmag in 1978. The latest issue No. 70 was distributed in the exhibition. 

Shimamoto sent works to Mark Bloch’s Postal Art Network under the banner of AU (“Artist Union,” later “Artist Unidentified”), a project that built on the Gutai principles while emphasizing even more explicitly that art is not about form, identity, or preconceived notions. In the AU movement, the focus was to go beyond traditional definitions of art, creating works that would elude categorization and highlight the act of creation itself. Shimamoto’s AU philosophy reflected his belief that art was more about the creative process than the object of or the identity relating to the work. By rejecting the conventional forms, AU embraced formlessness and ambiguity, rejecting artistic hierarchies and categories. This allowed Shimamoto to continue his radical experimentation with mediums like painting and performance, embodying the idea that art transcends the physical object.

In the exhibition, works by other Japanese artists, including “Brain Cell” by Ryosuke Cohen (Osaka), and mail art pieces from Seiko Miyazaki (Osaka), Fumiko Tatematsu (Osaka), Kayoko Shin (Osaka), and Shigeru Nakayama (Kyoto), are also showcased. Having never met these artists in person, Bloch figures that they took inspiration from Shimamoto because they are all from the Kasai region where Shimamoto was based. 

Bloch says, “Seiko Miyazaki’s piece is a favorite. She sent two cardboard hands attached by string — no envelope! The string had postage stamps wrapped around them. It was easier to send crazy stuff through the mail in those days.”

While research on correspondence art is gaining more attention and becoming increasingly important, Bloch was one of the first mail artists to gravitate towards online communities in as early as 1989, when only a handful of mail artists had computers. However, the reasons why digital mail art did not develop into a major movement that was noticed by the commercial art world may be that experiencing art on a screen lacked the qualities of physical and tactile interaction, and digitization  reduced the sense of uniqueness of the art and weakened the strong sense of community that physical mail fosters.


Kyoko Sato is the executive editor in chief and publisher of Japan Contemporaries. She has written for NY Standard on Gallery Tagboat, Onbeat and Shukan NY Seikatsu. She was producer at NHK Enterprises, and associate producer for the Asahi Shimbun.