Jiro Yoshihara was born in Osaka in 1905 and became much active in the Japanese avant-garde movement during the 1930s. He exhibited his works with the Nika group from 1934 until 1965 and also at the Salon de Mai in Paris in 1952, 1958 and 1961 and the International Carnegie Exhibition in 1961 in New York.
Yoshihara founded in Osaka in 1954 the Gutai group which carried out multiple activities and notably happenings with dancers jumping through paper screens of which torn pieces would fall like petals on the floor.
Yoshihara took part in an exhibition of the Gutai group in New York in 1958 and visited Europe in 1965.
He had also several one-man shows from 1928 while several of his abstract paintings were acquired by various museums, notably the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh and the International Center of Aesthetic Research of Turin.