Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987) was a Japanese artist and poet, renowned for his contribution to international Surrealism.

Yamamoto’s creative practice began to emerge at the beginning of the 1930s, when he started studying French, writing poetry and constructing his first collage compositions from newspaper headlines and cutouts. Yamamoto’s father had co-founded the Aiyū Photography Club and ran a photographic supply shop and studio which functioned as a nexus for Nagoya’s photography community. Several members of the club would join the 17–year old Yamamoto in establishing the Independent Photography Research Association in 1931, which would turn away from long-favoured Pictorialist aesthetics to embrace more experimental directions.

Throughout the 1930s touring exhibitions and independent journals (to which Yamamoto began to contribute himself) disseminated European Surrealist thought across Japan. Yamamoto co-founded the Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde in 1939, in spite of the suspicion, and increasingly repression, which avant-garde movements received from Japan’s imperial government. Whilst Yamamoto was not able to show his work in public until the war was over, he continued to create work at his own pace, without concern for the limited commercial avenues available to him even in the wake of Japan’s defeat. He went on to participate in groups including the Japan Subjective Photography League, and led the photography collective VIVI.

Yamamoto’s oeuvre has enjoyed a revival of critical interest in the 21^st century, following Tokyo Station Gallery’s major solo exhibition in 2001. Yamamoto was subsequently selected as one of the focusses of the double retrospective Japan’s Modern Divide at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2013). More recently his work has been displayed as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s touring exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders (2022) and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s show Avant-Garde Rising (2022). His photography is included in the permanent collections of the Nagoya City Art Museum, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and The Art Institute of Chicago.