Modernism has often been defined as a Western style. Especially after World War II, when New York with its abstract art sailed up as the new Mecca of art.

But the idea begins to be questioned. And the Modern Museum now shows with its small but very close exhibition of Atsuko Tanaka that the Americans Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage had independent female colleagues in Japan.

Atsuko Tanaka, who grew up during the war and joined the modernist Japanese Gutai group in the 1950s, longed for a whole new world. Away from nationalism and artistic "finesse," to an international art based on everyday material and movement, which abandoned galleries and museums and blurred the boundaries between space, time and space.

Yes, something completely new to a new world.

Several years before the Modern Museum's opening in Stockholm, the Japanese Gutai group focused on provocations against classical art rules. At happenings and fun-filled exhibitions in parks, where the audience played with works of textiles, concrete and temporary materials, which the elderly perceived as scrap and junk.

Much of this art was fleeting. The same applies to the contemporary Fluxus movement in the West; Fluxus means flow. And even Atsuko Tanaka's performance art was fleeting and trying. Therefore, not much remains.

But her electric costume, as the Modern Museum now shows (a copy of the original) is outstanding. As beautiful as pure sculpture! But also because it mediates the death contempt of the little artist when in 1956 she dragged around all the cords, donned the heavy costume and for the first time made it shine and blink on stage.

The exhibition is like a small bomb. Glitter and horror. Stinn of the technical optimism of the 50's, mixed with defiance and fear of nuclear weapons and death.