A display of work from the annual exhibition called the Yomiuri Indépendant is one of the loudest. Sponsored by one of the city’s leading newspaper companies, Yomiuri Shimbun, and installed yearly between 1949 and 1963 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the exhibition was admirably democratic in format. Anyone who had the art, the time, the drive or the guts to show could do so.

Unsurprisingly some pretty wild stuff turned up, particularly after 1957, when a new generation of young artists came on the scene. And some of that stuff is here. In 1958 Arakawa Shusaku poured a gloppy mixture of cement and cotton into a coffin-shaped box and let it harden; it lies there still, like a puddle of mold or a corpse dissolved in quicklime.

In 1961 Kikuhata Mokuma assembled an altarlike piece, called “Slave Genealogy (By Coins),” incorporating candles, a carved phallus, a scattering of five-yen coins and emblems associated with Shinto, Japan’s national religion and one with tainted political associations. A year later Nakanishi Natsuyuki attacked a canvas and then his own body with hundreds of metal clothespins as tiny and vicious-looking as piranhas, and Kudo Tetsumi festooned a room with duct-tape-wrapped light bulbs, baguettes and noodles.

An event that had started as a public relations gesture was now widely perceived as an anarchic spawning ground for what came to be called “anti-art.” In 1963 the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum issued exhibition guidelines, forbidding art that involved offensive sounds, bad smells or decomposed or toxic materials. The next year the show was canceled for good.

A political tipping point has been reached.

Since the late 1950s young artists had been taking critical stock of a top-down society that in their view used prosperity to hide inequities and muzzle protest and that, through its Western ties, was complicit in the American war in Vietnam. New, short-lived collectives like Neo-Dada, Hi Red Center and Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), advocated an art of direct action and made performance a primary medium.

Zero Jigen’s main work involved showing up at politically and socially significant events and romping around nude. For a 1964 project, “Shelter Plan,” Hi Red Center personnel measured people for one-person nuclear bomb shelters, referring to realities that the government wanted to forget. And during that year’s Tokyo Olympics — Japan’s big moment of image cleanup — they appeared throughout the city scrubbing the streets with toothbrushes.