10th Anniversary sympo: Flier

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.

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.

Abstracts: Day 2 (1) Students

Day 2: September 13, 2014, Saturday

New Scholarship Panel 1: Students

Discussant-at-Large: Alexandra Munroe

Moderated by Yasufumi Nakamori

Ruins of Flesh and Stone: A Foundational Discourse of Japanese Pornography in Postwar Media

Elizabeth Noelle Tinsley

This paper will address pornography in Japan, a genre that is underexamined by scholars, and trace a genealogy for it. It will focus on graphic art from the publication Kitan kurabu (Bizarre stories club), a postwar progenitor of pornography that awaits a critical study in its socio-historical context. The drawings, prints, and paintings I examine show sexualized female bodies depicted as victims of wartime atrocities and are framed by enthusiasts as an expression of sexual liberation and the new representations of sex that emerged after the war. However, this visual culture presents Buddhist and Christian motifs in subculture, and represents a new stage of the ero-guro (erotic grotesque) aesthetic. It is a rich resource for studies of the construction of sexuality, as well as for comprehending the trajectories taken by Christian and Buddhist artistic motifs in Japan.

Roofs and Grids in Postwar Japan: Tange Kenzō, Shirai Seiichi, and MuranoTōgo

Maki Iisaka

One of the core issues confronting architects in Japan since the emergence of modernism has been the role and meaning of Japanese tradition and its representations. In the mid-1950s, the terms of the debate were highly influenced by a series of articles in the journal Shinkenchiku, which introduced and vigorously promoted the idea of the Jomon-Yayoi dichotomy as the foundation of Japanese culture. Based on the premise that this mode of thought was a distraction which deflected attention away from what the architecture of the period actually reveals on the levels of material, effect, and representation, I propose an alternative reading that unravels the mechanism of transformation from the earlier mimetic transmission of tradition to practices less hampered by formal exigencies. This will be achieved through an analysis of the compositional and conceptual dialectic between the notions of grid and roof in buildings from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.

Around Kankyō: The Exhibition Installation of From Space to Environment

Yasutaka Tsuji
This paper investigates the 1966 exhibition From Space to Environment, held at Matsuya Department Store in Tokyo, involving the architects Isozaki Arata and Hara Hiroshi. This exhibition was instrumental in introducing the terms Intermedia and Environment Art (Kankyō geijutsu) to Japan. In studying these two aspects of postwar Japanese art, the past studies rightly observed the importance of the 1950s collective Jikken Kōbō/Experimental Workshop and the Expo ’70, in relation to such Western art movements as Fluxus or E.A.T. However, they have tended to focus on the binaries of “art and technology,” “Expo and anti-Expo,” and “nation-state and environment”—which in fact constitute discursive constuctions at the time. In contrast, this paper will focus on primary sources that illuminate the formation of Environment Society and the installation design to understand the models offered by architecture in the development of postwar art history.

Mura-e: Sanrizuka and a Shift in Documentaries of Protest

Nina Horisaki-Christens
In spite of rich histories of rural protest in Japan, the culture of protest was reframed by the strategies of the 1960s “season of politics” as a predominantly urban phenomenon in the context of the decade’s rapid urbanization. Against this backdrop, 1970s images of the Japanese countryside are often described as reactionary or politically disengaged. However, the case of Sanrizuka presents a rare exception that opens up the possibility of understanding the village as a site of political struggle. I will examine photographer Kitai Kazuo’s Sanrizuka 1969–1971 series through the lens of his engagement with figures like Ogawa Shinsuke and Nakahira Takuma, as well as within the context of the discussions of photographic subjectivity and the landscape discourse (fukei-ron) in the late 1960s. In doing so, I will propose reading Sanrizuka as a catalyst for return to the village as a site of resistance.

Bodies In-Between Spaces in dumb type’s Intermedia Performance OR

Joo Yun Lee
This paper will introduce dumb type, a Japanese intermedia performance collective (1984–) that defines itself as “political theatre” and deals with the problems inherent in Japanese society heavily conditioned by information technology and global capitalism. Particularly, this research will discuss the group’s investigation of the border between life and death or the in-betweenness of being in its intermedia performance OR, which addressed the issue of the diminished humanity in a society overloaded with information. In this context, the discussion will focus on the human/machine interface in OR, a body of work as a social space comprised of multiple layers of elements such as image, sound, lighting and bodies. Furthermore, the audio-visual interfaces as unique “thresholds of self and world” in OR will be discussed as cultural interfaces that reveal the specific social and cultural contexts of the media environment that engendered them.

Abstracts: Day 1

Day 1: September 12, 2014, Friday

ALERT
Please note that Day 1 Special Lecture is full now and advance registration is ended. 

ATTENTION!
Please note that Day 1 Workshop: venue changed, please go to Room 206, 31 Washington Place (Silver Center)

Special Lecture

Matsuzawa Yutaka in the Collection of MoMA

Reiko Tomii

The elder statesman of Japanese conceptualism, Matsuzawa Yutaka emerged in the early 1960s with his singular text-based practice whose twin principles were “vanishing of matter” and “meditative visualization” under the banner of Anti-Civilization. In 1970, he came into contact with Art & Project in Amsterdam and he went on to publish three issues of Bulletin and shows his work there. He also sent a few sets of his works, The Whole Works 1961–1971, consisting of 71 printed works that form the core of his conceptualist practice during the key decade, along with other works on paper. This special lecture will explore his radical reconfiguration of art by examining some of these rarely seen works in person. Special focus is given to his Non-Sensory Painting, which he devised in 1964 following his legendary revelation, but did not fully realize until 1967 as White Circle and other immaterial examples.

Workshop on Archival Documents

Moderated by Midori Yoshimoto

Japanese Mail Art, 1956-2014

John Held, Jr.

Japanese postwar artists have used the postal system to expand their international contacts and as a medium for creative expression. The history of Japanese mail art can be traced back to correspondence in 1956 between Gutai artist Yoshihara Jirō and Ray Johnson, the oft-acknowledged “father of mail art.” After the demise of Gutai, Shimamoto Shōzō, continued the practice, diffusing it throughout Japan through his leadership in the art association AU, short for both “Artist’s Union” and “Art Unidentified.” Correspondence between Yoshihara and Johnson, as reproduced in Gutai magazine, will be presented, as well as actual copies of AU Newsletter (1976-2014). Documentation of postal activities by On Kawara and Fluxus-associated artist Shiomi Mieko will also be provided. Mail Art by contemporary artists Ryōsuke Cohen, Nakamura Keiichi, Matsuhashi Eiichi and others, will be made available for inspection to workshop participants.

Encapsulating an Archival Impulse: Kudō Tetsumi’s Philosophy of Impotence, as Seen through His Archive

Rika Hiro

The Kudō Tetsumi Papers at the Aomori Museum of Art is very rich in content but rarely used. This paper introduces the archive and examines an object, documentation, and select materials from the archive that pertain to Kudō’s seminal sculpture/installation, Philosophy of Impotence (1961–62). The work originally consists of industrial and everyday materials, including foodstuff, over a hundred phallus-like objects, and magazine clippings. In particular, I pay close attention to the last component to highlight the functions and contributions of the archival materials to the formation of this work. They as much complicate the current understanding of Philosophy of Impotence in particular and Kudō’s practice in general as they support the past scholarship. In short, I argue that they attest that the act of archiving—collecting, selecting, and keeping—was a crucial practice for the artist, beyond the fact that the artwork is an assemblage.

Narrative Resonance: Asian American Art Archives

Alexandra Chang

Collections projects that are building the invaluable and essential primary source repositories on Asian American Art are enabling art historical resources, publications, and curricula, both in print and online. The archive has revealed transnational intersections and layered contextualizations of Asian American artistic production. This presentation will explore how multiple narratives within the history of the movement can be revealed and enabled through selections from The Yoshio Kishi and Irene Yah Ling Sun Collection and Godzilla: Asian American Art Network Papers at the New York University Fales Library and Special Collections (which holds iconic primary source materials from the artist group that was at the forefront of the Asian American arts movement in the 1990s in New York City). This talk will also explore how the Virtual Asian American Art Museum Project is harnessing collections to bring forth such complex narratives.

Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s Four Thoughts: A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma with Full Documentary Misinformation
Kevin Concannon
In late May and early June of 1968, Yoko Ono and John Lennon presented their first joint exhibition at London’s Arts Lab. Newspaper listings suggest that it began as Ono’s solo exhibition, then changed to a joint exhibition. Curiously, little critical attention seems to have been paid to the show at the time, perhaps because the May 1968 Student Riots consumed media attention. In recent years, Ono’s own telling of the event focuses on Lennon’s contribution, ignoring her own. But The Observer (London) ran a very short review: “In a show otherwise given over to the bland Oriental offerings of Yoko Ono, a Japanese lady who made the famous ‘multi bottoms’ film, Lennon’s produced a long low white plinth with two slabs of wood angled upon it…. Spectator participation is invited.” In this workshop presentation the archival evidence will be considered, suggesting that the story remains untold.

Seeing A Panorama of Sightseeing Art at Tama: Nakamura Hiroshi's Notebook at Tōbunken
Kikkawa Hideki, with translation by Nina Horisaki-Christens
Sightseeing Art Research Institute (Kankō Geijutsu Kenkyūjo) was established by Nakamura Hiroshi and Tateishi Kōichi (aka Tiger Tateishi) in March 1964. In the height of the Anti-Art movement in the early 1960s, the duo daringly explored the possibility of painting. Their first joint project was held on a dry riverbed of the Tama River. This Panorama is a drawing Nakamura created afterwards and pasted into his notebook, which is now in the collection of National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo (Tōbunken). I will examine Panorama in detail and discuss the meanings of important objects presented in the outdoor exhibition in reference to Nakamura’s documentary film Das Kapital.