Kumi Sugaï is regarded the most important representative of a Japanese post-war abstraction.
Kumi Sugaï, who had moved to Paris in 1952, attained to combine artistic traditions of his home country with the newly-established "world language" of gestic abstraction in the 1950s. He made lyrical paintigs in the style of the "Nouvelle Ecole de Paris", he transferred Japanese calligraphy into an informal sign system. Geometric forms began to dominate his work as of the 1960s, which Kumi Sugaï now arranged in powerful clear colors with exact contours. Besides paintings, Kumi Sugaï also made much-respected graphic works.
Numerous exhibitions, such as the one-man show in the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover (1963) honor the internationally acknowledged artist Kumi Sugaï. Particularly worthwhile mentioning are the two large retrospectives in the National Museum of Modern Art in Kioto (1969) and in the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki (1984 and 1992).