The Gutai Art Association (具体美術協会, Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai; or, short, Gutai) was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954. It operated until shortly after Yoshihara's death in 1972.

The group, today one of the most internationally-recognized instances of 20th century Japanese art, is best known for the broad range of experimental art forms combining painting with performance, conceptual, interactive, site-specific, theatrical and installation artworks, which its members explored in unconventional venues such as public parks and on stage. The members’ engagement with the relationship between spirit, human body and material, often concretized in artistic methods that involved the artist’s body and violent gestures.

Fueled by Yoshihara’s ambitions, global scope and strategic awareness, Gutai’s exhibitions and publications reached audiences around the world, realizing what Yoshihara called an “international common ground” of art. Gutai exchanged and collaborated with many artists, art critics and curators from Europe, the US and South Africa, among them the French art critic Michel Tapié and the artists he promoted, art dealers Martha Jackson in New York and Rodolphe Stadler in Paris, the Dutch artist group Nul, the German artist group Zero, and individual artists including John Cage, Christo Coetzee, Merce Cunningham, Paul Jenkins, Ray Johnson, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Rauschenberg. Until the group’s dissolution in 1972 following Yoshihara’s death, around 60 artists were involved as members.

The critical reception of Gutai was strongly affected by the shifts in art discourse from the 1950s to the late 1960s, particularly from gestural painting to more performative approaches and so-called anti-art movements of the 1960s. While Gutai works are recognized for anticipating ideas and approaches of European and US-American art of the 1960s, such as performance, happening, pop, minimal, conceptual, environmental and land art, Gutai artists referred to a broader understanding of picturing embodied in the Japanese term e (picture), which allowed them to overcome conventions of painting.

Gutai was founded in 1954 by artists under the leadership of the Ashiya-based painter and businessman Jirō Yoshihara, who was an influential figure in the revitalization of cultural life in Japan in the post-World War II years. Yoshihara, a member of Nika-kai, had co-founded the Ashiya City Art Association in 1947, engaged in the establishment of the Ashiya City Exhibitions, and mentored young artists. In 1951, he co-founded the Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group, known as Genbi), a forum for interdisciplinary exchange and discussion of East-Asian and Western modern and traditional arts, including ikebana, calligraphy and pottery. Genbi artists shared a preference for abstract art and had a strongly international scope fueled by their ongoing engagement with European and US-American artists, which became also a key aspect for Gutai.

In late 1954, Yoshihara and 16 artists, including his students (e.g. Tsuruko Yamazaki and Shozo Shimamoto, his students since 1946 and 1947), Genbi and Ashiya City Exhibition participants, decided to create a new group under the name of Gutai (the name was proposed by Shimamoto) and to issue a journal under the same name. The founding members were Sadami Azuma, Kei Iseya, Tamiko Ueda, Chiyū Uemae, Hiroshi Okada, Hajime Okamoto, Shōzō Shimamoto, Yoshio Sekine, Shigeru Tsujimura, Tōichirō Fujikawa, Hiroshi Funai, Masanobu Masatoshi, Tsuruko Yamazaki, Toshio Yoshida, Hideo Yoshihara, Jirō Yoshihara and his son Michio Yoshihara. The first issue of Gutai appeared in January 1955.

In March 1955, several founding members showed paintings all entitled Gutai at the 3rd Yomiuri Independent Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in March 1955, but until the summer of 1955, more than half of them had left the group (some disappointed by the priority that Yoshihara gave to the Gutai journal instead of actual exhibitions). However, the group took a stronger, more conceptual direction following this break with the addition of new members such as Sadamasa Motonaga, and the artists of Zero-kai (Zero Society) Akira Kanayama, Saburō Murakami, Kazuo Shiraga, and Atsuko Tanaka.

By choosing the Japanese term gutai, which means concrete, as opposed to both abstract (chūshō) and figurative (gushō), the group distinguished themselves from contemporary figurative art, such as Surrealism and social realism, as well as from formalist geometric abstraction. The kanji used to write 'gu' meaning tool, measures, or a way of doing something, while 'tai' means body. The individual artistic approaches of many members were characterized by unconventional, experimental methods of applying paint, which they soon extended to three dimensional objects, performance, and installation works. Yoshihara constantly urged his younger fellows to “Create what has never been done before!”, and by proposing unconventional exhibition formats, he stimulated the creation of radically innovative works that transcended conventional definitions of artistic genres. This dynamic artistic relationship between Yoshihara and his younger fellow members over the years engendered Gutai’s “culture of experimentation”.