A lurid green hue emanates from Hauser & Wirth’s North Gallery in London. Upon further inspection, what looks from afar to be a grassy playground is the gallery’s recent exhibition showcasing the late Japanese avant-garde artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935–1990). Organized by art dealer Olivier Renaud Clément, and jointly mounted with New York’s Andrea Rosen Gallery, the show features a selection of Kudo’s works originating from the first decades he spent in his adopted home of Paris, where he moved to from Japan in 1962. The playful ambience established by the AstroTurf-covered floor, however, immediately dissipates upon entry, and the contents of the room could not be further from childlike simplicity. Instead, the garish green serves as a marked reminder of the disillusionment Kudo felt toward our increasingly hyper-industrialized society and its vapid assurances of an improved future.

The first works that viewers encounter are from the “Human Bonsai – Freedom of Deformity – Deformity of Freedom” series (1978–79). Its title is quite literally inscribed onto the base of the two pieces that comprise the work, which accentuates the exasperation that Kudo had felt with the postwar modern world and its misconceived humanist ideals. The works here consist of an abominable amalgamation of chains, phalli and decaying flowers, accompanied by an atmosphere of foreboding. Together the objects serve as a metaphor for what happens when humans over-cultivate or modify nature in accordance with our blind values. Despite the flourishing economies and general restorative optimism that followed World War II in Japan and the West, Kudo chose to focus instead on the artifice of supposedly progressive industrialization, which was emphasized by his selection of purely manmade materials—such as artificial soil, resin, plastic and glass beads—in creating his work.

Kudo, though born in Osaka in 1935, spent the majority of his youth several prefectures to the west in Okayama. A seminal figure within Tokyo’s anti-art movement in the 1950s, Kudo’s early works were fixated on nuclear catastrophe. His overriding obsession with nuclear threat can most clearly be seen in his “Dome series” (1970–71), a collection of macabre Perspex spheres, domes and boxes that form terrariums filled with neon synthetic cacti, soil and rats. His frequent and varied inclusion of phalli further warns of potential disaster, suggesting that impotence is imminent in a dystopian, post-nuclear future. The glass sphere of Cultivation of Nature & People Who Are Looking At It (1970–71) predicts our passive gaze amid such destruction, addressing the irony of society's cultivation of nature for recreation and subsequent inaction when faced with its decay.

Kudo's concern with nuclear destruction is again shown in Your Portrait May 66 (1966), a black-light-illuminated installation. It features a typical beachside set up, except that pair of beach chairs are abandoned, with only eerie, neon traces of human bodies remaining on them. Whimsical but highly sobering, the fluorescent light and over-saturated artificial colors critique the excesses of consumerism and its nightmarish outcomes.

The clear focal point of the exhibition is Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule (1968), which is part of Kudo’s “Cube Series” (1962–68). For this work, Kudo created a 3.5-square-meter cube, with a small opening through which viewers can glimpse its UV-illuminated interior. The inside of the cube is littered with replicas of phalli and dismembered limbs, which are dwarfed by towering, fluorescent flowers. These mutated flowers seem to warn against eschewing the natural for the fake. Other works from the series consist of small boxes containing various biological matter, which are juxtaposed with different mechanical apparatuses. The biological forms resemble organic objects, but are somehow perverted by being made alien and unrecognizable. Particularly poignant is a cube painted on the exterior to resemble a die—emphasizing that life is determined by chance and countering the more mainstream, Western notion of agency.

Kudo had always been condemnatory, portentous and frank. However, at Hauser and Wirth, this aspect of his character is presented especially pointedly, as we are lulled into a false sense of comfort by the external brightness of his work. Yet the experience—once we discover the disquieting, underlying message of his work—is highly unsettling. We are drawn into a poisonous dystopia, one that is all too familiar, only to leave after being woken up to our lasciviousness and incited by the works of Kudo to take his warnings seriously.

“Tetsumi Kudo” is on view at Hauser & Wirth, London, until November 21, 2015.

• United Kingdom
• Japan