Abstracts Day 2 (2) Professionals

Day 2: September 13, 2014, Saturday

Scholarship Panel 2: Professionals

Discussant-at-Large: Alexandra Munroe
Moderated by Thomas Crow

Towards a New Human Geography of Paris

Ming Tiampo

This paper presents the artistic friendship of Korean artist Chung Sang-Hwa and Japanese artist Matsutani Takesada, charting their interrogation of the painted surface in the context of Paris in the 1960s and 70s, where they both lived and worked. The friendship between these two artists provides insight into the role that Paris played as a crucible of encounter, to produce a visual and conceptual dialogue that wove together artistic discourses from France, Japan and Korea. At a distance from all three traditions, and yet embedded within them, Chung and Matsutani developed a profound and transnational critique of painting. Although it represents just one thin narrative thread, the friendship between Chung and Matsutani is representative of many such encounters that, woven together, would enable the emergence of a new human geography of Paris that recasts it from being the site of Modernism’s origins, to its site of encounter. 

Tokyo Pop’s Second Wave: Tanaami Keiichi and Yokoo Tadanori

Hiroko Ikegami
“Tokyo Pop” is a broad phenomenon from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s in which a number of artists produced Pop-inspired works. Whereas the first wave of Tokyo Pop peaked around the mid-1960s with major players being such artists as Shinohara Ushio and Kojima Nobuaki, the second wave encompassed graphic designers Yokoo Tadanori and Tanaami Keiichi, who engaged with American Pop (both art and culture) in their work in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. I will examine the critical strategies of Yokoo and Tanaami with which they faced not only the overwhelming presence of America—both cultural and political—in Japan, but also the invisible yet firm boundary between art and design in the Japanese art world. By combining American pop imagery with Japan’s own graphic tradition, they critiqued the bulldozing effect of American culture on Japanese life and rendered knowing commentaries on postwar Japan’s “internal America.” 

Koizumi Meirō: The Kamikaze Projects—Toward a Definition of “Third Generation” in Japan
Ayelet Zohar
Koizumi Meirō has created seven different projects that confront the concept of Kamikaze and its absence/presence in contemporary Japanese culture. His work ranges from complete theatrical fiction, street performances, to works based on documentary footage of interviews with surviving Kamikaze pilot. My analysis of Koizumi's work refers to the concept of Third Generation in Japan, in relation to the theoretical work presented on this concept in the context of Holocaust Studies. While First Generation victims were struggling to survive and let go of war experiences, Second Generation members were starting to create Japan's booming success of the 1960s–80s. Young men and women born into the Third Generation (born after 1970) are already freed from the actual, tangible, living evidence and pains of war, thus have a better position to question the history and context of war in Japan.

Collective Response: Itō Tōyō, Hatakeyama Naoya, and the Utopian Promise of the Tōhoku Disaster
Majella Munro
A close interrelationship between art and allied disciplines, together with an established history of collaborative production, has primed Japanese practitioners to address how a collective artistic response to disaster might be realized, and what it might achieve. Collaboration between photographer Hatakeyama Naoya and architect Itō Tōyō, as showcased in the award-winning Home-for-All presentation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, responds to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster afflicting Japan since March 2011. It reveals the realities of surviving a natural disaster and overcoming trauma and displacement, and how to turn these crises to advantage by rebuilding on better terms. By exploiting the potential of art to offer a space for unrestricted creative thought, together Hatakeyama and Itō generate original solutions to seemingly overwhelming problems. Given that we all face increasingly urgent ecological threats, it is valuable to examine what this internationally-acclaimed contribution indicates for the future of Japan, the region, and beyond.

Yanagi Yukinori and the Inland Sea: Demography, Politics, and Welfare in "Post-Growth" Utopian Community Art Projects

Adrian Favell

Having first emerged as one of the central Neo-Pop artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yanagi Yukinori has subsequently established himself as a key figure exploring both critical and utopian reflections on the past, present, and future of Japan as a prototypical "post-growth" society—in terms of its demography, economy, and relative cultural decline. This paper will focus on his recent projects on two Inland Sea islands: his Seirensho factory conversion and house projects on Inujima and his new “Art Base” in an abandoned school on Momoshima. I will discuss their wider global relevance on three dimensions: his place in an emerging history of the 1990s cohort of artists from Japan; the ambiguous politics of welfare-based interventions focused on “surplus” populations of old people and lost generation youth; and the changing notion of art and artists as they take on roles of producer-curators, social workers, and political gurus.