Sayako Kishimoto was born in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, the second daughter of psychiatrist, Ken’ichi Kishimoto, a professor at Nagoya City University’s medical school, and his wife Natsuko. After gaining recognition in the 1960s for her avant-garde practices, she resumed working in the 1980s following a decade-long hiatus. During her years of activity, S. Kishimoto developed a unique artistic approach that combined painting, performance and written compositions.
From an early age, S. Kishimoto attended painting lessons with Kenkichi Chihara (1904-1998) and Masao Yabuno (1907-1990). In 1955 she enrolled in the art course at Aichi Prefectural Asahigaoka Senior High School where she began learning painting techniques in earnest. There she was greatly influenced by Masayoshi Nakamura (1924–1977), a Japanese-style Nihonga painter working as a teacher in the art department. She was also greatly inspired by the presence of Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014), Shūsaku Arakawa (1936-2010) and Shin’ichi Iwata (1935-2017), who were her seniors in the programme.

Following her first failed attempt at entering university, she successfully enrolled in the Nihonga department of Tama Art University in 1959. She graduated four years later, in 1963. However, unsatisfied with the conservative coursework, she showed an eagerness to participate in the Neo-Dadaism Organizer art collective and the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. Consequently, she is frequently referred to as the “lone woman of Neo-Dada,” but it is inadequate, and rather inappropriate, to describe her painting career through a group that was only active from March to October 1960. Moreover, while the confusing use of Neo Dada for the group’s name puts us in mind of artists like Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), this was an entirely different group comprised of solely Japanese artists.

Beginning with her first solo exhibition at the Naiqua Gallery in 1964, S. Kishimoto was an active participant in group and solo exhibitions. Around this time, she began exhibiting the installation-like tendency to fill the entire gallery space with her own works. In the 1970s she sought to make a living from her own planning and think-tank businesses, taking a break from her artistic activities for a brief period. She resumed work in 1977 with a solo exhibition at the Meiji Gallery.

After returning to her hometown of Nagoya for breast cancer surgery, she began presenting performances that resembled acts of street preaching, calling herself a “messenger from hell”, and took up a diverse array of activities, including overseeing art classes and planning a series of symposia on art and culture. Paintings from this period develop megalomaniacal stories across the passage of time, using large-scale horizontal canvases that evoke traditional Japanese handscrolls.

S. Kishimoto believed that various problems, such as war, could be solved by overwriting the power-oriented masculine principle that had dominated the 20th century with a 21st-century feminine principal based on love and freedom, and she posed these beliefs to the world in the form of literary compositions and in her street-preaching performances. Although these feminist ideals were in no way easy to understand, she went on to express them in allegorical form in her later large-scale works, in which animals took starring roles.

In 1983 S. Kishimoto stood as a candidate for the House of Councillors but was not elected. Her broadcast of political views was characterised by its foresight, denying the world’s orientation towards power and upward mobility, and advocating for the human rights of sexual minorities and other disenfranchised groups. She died of breast cancer in 1988.