Most people who hear the name UltraGirl think of a superhero. In Japan, the same idea had a life in the art world first. In August 1986, Bijutsu Techō, the country’s most influential art magazine, ran a special issue titled Bijutsu no chō-shōjotachi, The Ultra Girls of Art, profiling thirty-nine women artists working at the height of the bubble economy.

A word built in three steps

The magazine did not coin the word. It came from the critic Chizuru Miyasako, whose 1984 book Chō-shōjo e, “Toward the Ultra Girl”, described three stages. The shōjo, the girl, has had her independence taken from her. The hi-shōjo, the non-girl, has seen that happen and is estranged by it. The chō-shōjo, the ultra girl, keeps her independence and her empathy for others, and rejects what Miyasako called the masculine principle.

It started with a comic

Miyasako found her ultra girl in manga, not in a gallery. The book works through the comics of Moto Hagio, who reshaped shōjo manga in the 1970s, and names as its example the Martian heroine of Hagio’s Star Red, published in 1980. In 1989 the critic Eiji Ōtsuka added a second idea: in a consumer society, anyone who only consumes is a girl, whatever their age or gender, so the ultra girl is the one who makes things.

What happened to the Ultra Girls

The curator Yukiko Yokoyama, who has researched the issue, describes the term as ambiguous: once the magazine took it up, it drifted away from Miyasako’s argument. The editor-in-chief was a man, the issue’s one long essay kept returning the artists to ideas of the feminine, and about half of the thirty-nine cannot now be confirmed to have kept working. Others did. Mika Yoshizawa exhibits and teaches, Shōko Maemoto returned after fifteen years away, Tomoko Ushijima moved to Fukuoka and has had a series of solo museum shows, and Chie Matsui has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Why it is on this site

UltraGirl Unlimited has no connection to the 1986 issue and claims none. It belongs here because it is part of what the name has meant, and because an idea about girls who refuse to be diminished was first worked out through a comic. The What is an UltraGirl? page tells it alongside the name’s lives in sport and fashion, and Yokoyama’s full article is on AWARE, Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions.