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Tsuchi
An examination of Japanese contemporary art through the lens of ecocriticism and environmental history Collectively referred to by the word tsuchi, earthy materials such as soil and clay are prolific in Japanese contemporary art. Highlighting works of photography, ceramics, and installation art, Bert Winther-Tamaki explores the many aesthetic manifestations of tsuchi and their connection to the country's turbulent environmental history, investigating how Japanese artists have continually sought a passionate and redemptive engagement with earth. In the seven decades following 1955, Japan has experienced severe environmental degradation as a result of natural disasters, industrial pollution, a...
Art in the Encounter of Nations
Art in the Encounter of Nations is the first book-length study of interactions between the Japanese and American art worlds in the early postwar years. It brings to light a rich exchange of opinions and debates regarding the relationship between the art of the two nations. The author begins with an examination of the Japanese margins of American Abstract Expressionism. Taking a contrapuntal approach, he investigates four abstract painters: two Japanese artists who moved to the United States (Okada Kenzo and Hasegawa Saburo) and two European Americans whose work is often associated with Japanese calligraphy (Mark Tobey and Franz Kline). He then looks at the work of two young scions of the cal...
The Politics of Painting
This book examines a set of paintings produced in Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s that have received little scholarly attention. Asato Ikeda views the work of four prominent artists of the time—Yokoyama Taikan, Yasuda Yukihiko, Uemura Shōen, and Fujita Tsuguharu—through the lens of fascism, showing how their seemingly straightforward paintings of Mount Fuji, samurai, beautiful women, and the countryside supported the war by reinforcing a state ideology that justified violence in the name of the country’s cultural authenticity. She highlights the politics of “apolitical” art and challenges the postwar labeling of battle paintings—those depicting scenes of war and combat—...
Gutai
Gutai is the first book in English to examine Japan’s best-known modern art movement, a circle of postwar artists whose avant-garde paintings, performances, and installations foreshadowed many key developments in American and European experimental art. Working with previously unpublished photographs and archival resources, Ming Tiampo considers Gutai’s pioneering transnational practice, spurred on by mid-century developments in mass media and travel that made the movement’s field of reception and influence global in scope. Using these lines of transmission to claim a place for Gutai among modernist art practices while tracing the impact of Japan on art in Europe and America, Tiampo demonstrates the fundamental transnationality of modernism. Ultimately, Tiampo offers a new conceptual model for writing a global history of art, making Gutai an important and original contribution to modern art history.
Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde
The Bokujinkai—or ‘People of the Ink’—was a group formed in Kyoto in 1952 by five calligraphers: Morita Shiryū, Inoue Yūichi, Eguchi Sōgen, Nakamura Bokushi, and Sekiya Yoshimichi. The avant-garde movement they launched aspired to raise calligraphy to the same level of international prominence as abstract painting. To this end, the Bokujinkai collaborated with artists from European Art Informel and American Abstract Expressionism, sharing exhibition spaces with them in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and beyond. The first English-language book to focus on the postwar history of Japanese calligraphy, Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde explains how the Bokujinkai rerouted the trajectory of global abstract art and attuned foreign audiences to calligraphic visualities and narratives.
Zen Landscapes
The essential elements of a dry Japanese garden are few: rocks, gravel, moss. Simultaneously a sensual matrix, a symbolic form, and a memory theater, these gardens exhibit beautiful miniaturization and precise craftsmanship. But their apparent minimalism belies a true complexity. In Zen Landscapes, Allen S. Weiss takes readers on an exciting journey through these exquisite sites, explaining how Japanese gardens must be approached according to the play of scale, surroundings, and seasons, as well as in relation to other arts—revealing them as living landscapes rather than abstract designs. Weiss shows that these gardens are inspired by the Zen aesthetics of the tea ceremony, manifested in p...
History Painting Crossing Borders, A Transnational History of Modern Art in Early Twentieth-Century China and Japan
If the goal of art history is to elucidate the politics of difference, does it matter when artworks look alike? How do we account for historical connections across regions—in particular, East Asia—if works are viewed from a purely nationalistic perspective? History painting is typically interpreted within nationalist frameworks; History Painting Crossing Borders instead asks a series of provocative questions about the meaning and purpose of art and interpretation. Weaving together a diverse range of materials in Chinese, Japanese, and French, Stephanie Su showcases a transnational history of modern art in East Asia by centering two pioneering artists in Japan and China, Nakamura Fusetsu ...
A Secret History of Clay
The qualities that have caused clay to be overlooked as a medium by those writing the history of modern art are precisely those that make it attractive to artists. It is easy to work, fragile, inexpensive, unpredictable and physical, and therefore inherently subversive. A Secret History of Clay reveals the previously undisclosed love affair between artists and this most humble of materials and in doing so re-writes modern art history. Works by some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, many never reproduced before, will be fully illustrated in colour, tracing the transition of ceramics from a craft pursuit to something altogether more radical. Simon Groom, curator of the exhibition, argues the case for a re-examination of the use of clay in modern art. The distinguished ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal explores its history, examining little-known works works by groups such as the Fauves, Russian Suprematists, German Expressionists, Italian Futurists, and CoBrA, as well as by artists including Duchamp, Miro, Picasso and Noguchi. The book will also feature extracts from the manifestos and writings of both artists and critics on the use of clay. Starting with Gauguin,
Yukinori Yanagi
Yukinori Yanagi is the first English-language monograph of Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi. Presenting seven series of works from throughout Yanagi's thirty-five-year career, this monograph features never-before-published archival materials and artist interviews alongside large-scale reproductions and original texts by scholars Mika Yoshitake and Bert Winther-Tamaki. This comprehensive retrospective of Yanagi's work will provide English-speaking audiences the chance to engage with his politically and socially engaged practice for the first time.
Human Subjectivity and Confrontation with Materials in Japanese Art
This dissertation focuses on the remarkable approaches toward materials in art objects taken by the Japanese modernist art group the Gutai Art Association (Gutai) and its leader Yoshihara Jiro (1905-1972) in the mid-1950s. Responding to the Japanese art community's concerns with representation of human experience and national identity, Yoshihara and the Gutai members placed special emphasis on how the intervention of the artist became inscribed in the materials of the object. Their recognition of the importance of the artist's engagement with materials as an expression of human presence in visual art radically departed from the contemporary Japanese art practice of representation and interpretation of the physical world. By expanding the use of tools and materials beyond oil paint, paintbrush and canvas, Gutai transformed the practice of Japanese modernist art that had evolved in dialogue with Western art since the late 19th century. In the process they grappled with the thorny issue of national identity in cultural production.
