Presenter Profiles

PoNJA-GenKon 10th Anniversary Symposium

For a New Wave to Come: Post-1945 Japanese Art History Now

Alexandra Chang is the Curator of Special Projects and Director of Global Arts Programs at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute. Author of Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Visual Arts Collectives (2008, Timezone 8 Artbooks), she is Co-Editor of the journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill, forthcoming in 2015) in collaboration with A/P/A Institute and Concordia University’s Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

Kevin Concannon is Professor of Art History and Director of the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on art of the 1960s with an emphasis on the work of Yoko Ono.

Adrian Favell is professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Paris. A 2006-7 Japan Foundation Abe Fellow, he is the author of Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011 (2012), and has also published essays in Art in America, Bijutsu techō, Impressions, Artforum, and ART-iT online. He is currently working on a book about "post-growth" art and architecture in Japan with Julian Worrall.

Based in San Francisco, John Held, Jr. collects, documents, and institutionalizes late-20th/early-21st century alternative art practices, having placed collections with the Getty Research Institute and MoMA, New York. His personal papers are housed at the Archives of American Art. He curated Gutai: Experimental Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Winter Burning Sun at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2013.

Rika Hiro is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation looks at the aftereffects of the atomic bombs in postwar art in Japan. Before coming to USC, she co-founded the non-profit art space Art2102 of Los Angeles and co-curated Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970 at the Getty Research Institute.

Nina Horisaki-Christens is an independent curator and Ph.D. student in Art History at Columbia University. A 2012-13 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, she also served as Interim Curator at Art in General, and worked as Research Assistant on Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her current research focuses on relationships between performance and media art in Japan from the late 1960s through the 1970s.

Maki Iisaka is a Ph.D. student in architecture at Texas A&M University. Her dissertation focuses on Japanese architecture during the decades after WWII. She is interested in how opposing ideas and methods of the period have been received in Japan and abroad, and how this reception can be framed in relation to issues of representation, tradition, commercialization, and architectural discourse.

Hiroko Ikegami is an art historian who specializes in post-1945 American art and global modernisms. Her publications include The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (MIT Press, 2010) and Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York (SUNY Press, 2012). She is currently working on the topic of Pop Art in Japan and serves as a consulting curator for Walker Art Center’s International Pop exhibition.

Hideki Kikkawa is a librarian specializing in modern and contemporary Japanese art. Currently a research fellow at National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, he was previously affiliated with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2002–2006) and National Art Center, Tokyo (2006–2011). He has compiled numerous bibliographies of individual artists and chronologies of artists organizations, including Dokuritsu Art Association and Kōfūkai.

Joo Yun Lee is a PhD candidate in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University, SUNY. She studies the intersection of contemporary art and computational media and is working on a dissertation, “Sensuous Communities: Materialized Spectatorship in Ryōji Ikeda’s Intermedia Installations and Performances.” Her research focuses on the spectatorship in installation art, performance and architecture that incorporate new technologies. 

Majella Munro is currently writing a monograph entitled Close to Nature? Japanese Artists and the Environment from Hiroshima to Fukushima at Tate’s Research Centre: Asia-Pacific. Her book Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan was released through Enzo Arts and Publishing in December 2012.

Ming Tiampo is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is a scholar of transnational vanguardism with a focus on Japan after 1945. Her book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received an honorable mention for the Robert Motherwell Book award. In 2013, she was co-curator of the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Elizabeth Tinsley is a Ph.D. candidate in Religion at Columbia University. She received her B.A. in History of Art from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Buddhist Culture from Ōtani University in Kyoto. She is currently working on two projects: kami icons in esoteric Buddhism, and religious images in the Japanese visual culture of the grotesque from the premodern period through postwar pulp and into present-day subcultures.

Reiko Tomii is an independent art historian and curator, who investigates postwar Japanese art in global and local contexts. She co-founded PoNJA-GenKon in 2003. Her research topic encompasses “international contemporaneity,” collectivism, and conceptualism in 1960s art. A prolific scholar, she is preparing a book-length study, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (to be published by MIT Press).

Yasutaka Tsuji specializes in the history of art and architecture in post-1945 Japan . He is currently Research Fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at the University of Tokyo. In 2014–15, he will be Visiting Scholar in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, with a fellowship of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Japanese government.

Aylet Zohar is a transdisciplinary artist, independent curator, and a visual culture researcher, specializing in contemporary Japanese art and Japaese photography. She is a lecturer at the department of Art History at Tel Aviv University.  Her recent article, "Performativity and Invisibility: World War II Memory in Japanese Photography," will soon be published in Positions: Asia Critique. She currently works on a book-length manuscript that looks at war memory in contemporary Japanese photography.