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, and nuclear irradiation. Artists have responded to these ongoing catastrophes through modes of "mudlarking" and "muckracking," utilizing raw elements from nature to establish deeper contact with the primal resources of their world and expose its unfettered contamination. Providing a comparative assessment of more than seventy works of art, this study reveals Japanese artists' engagement with a richly diverse repertoire of earthy materialities, elucidating their aesthetic properties, changing conditions, and cultural significance. By focusing on the role of tsuchi as a convergence point for a wide range of creative practices, this book offers a critical reassessment of contemporary art in Japan and its intrinsic relationship to the environment. Situating art within the context of ecology and urbanization, Tsuchi shows artists striving to explore and reprocess raw forms of earth beneath the corruptions of human activity.
Maximum Embodiment presents a compelling thesis articulating the historical character of Yoga, literally the “Western painting” of Japan. The term designates what was arguably the most important movement in modern Japanese art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Perhaps the most critical marker of Yoga was its association with the medium of oil-on-canvas, which differed greatly from the water-based pigments and inks of earlier Japanese painting. Yoga encompassed both establishment fine art and avant-gardist insurgencies, but in both cases, as the term suggests, it was typically focused on techniques, motifs, canons, or iconographies that were obtained in Europe and deployed by Japanese artists. Despite recent advances in Yoga studies, important questions remain unanswered: What specific visuality did the protagonists of Yoga seek from Europe and contribute to modern Japanese society? What qualities of representation were so dearly coveted as to stimulate dedication to the pursuit of Yoga? What distinguished Yoga in Japanese visual culture? This study answers these questions by defining a paradigm of embodied representation unique to Yoga painting that may be conceptualized in four registers: first, the distinctive materiality of oil paint pigments on the picture surface; second, the depiction of palpable human bodies; third, the identification of the act and product of painting with a somatic expression of the artist’s physical being; and finally, rhetorical metaphors of political and social incorporation. The so-called Western painters of Japan were driven to strengthen subjectivity by maximizing a Japanese sense of embodiment through the technical, aesthetic, and political means suggested by these interactive registers of embodiment. Balancing critique and sympathy for the twelve Yoga painters who are its principal protagonists, Maximum Embodiment investigates the quest for embodiment in some of the most compelling images of modern Japanese art. The valiant struggles of artists to garner strongly embodied positions of subjectivity in the 1910s and 1930s gave way to despairing attempts at fathoming and mediating the horrifying experiences of real life during and after the war in the 1940s and 1950s. The very properties of Yoga that had been so conducive to expressing forceful embodiment now produced often gruesome imagery of the destruction of bodies. Combining acute visual analysis within a convincing conceptual framework, this volume provides an original account of how the drive toward maximum embodiment in early twentieth-century Yoga was derailed by an impulse toward maximum disembodiment.
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, and nuclear irradiation. Artists have responded to these ongoing catastrophes through modes of “mudlarking” and “muckracking,” utilizing raw elements from nature to establish deeper contact with the primal resources of their world and expose its unfettered contamination. Providing a comparative assessment of more than seventy works of art, this study reveals Japanese artists’ engagement with a richly diverse repertoire of earthy materialities, elucidating their aesthetic properties, changing conditions, and cultural significance. By focusing on the role of tsuchi as a convergence point for a wide range of creative practices, this book offers a critical reassessment of contemporary art in Japan and its intrinsic relationship to the environment. Situating art within the context of ecology and urbanization, Tsuchi shows artists striving to explore and reprocess raw forms of earth beneath the corruptions of human activity.
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 calligraphy and pottery worlds of Japan -- Morita Shiryo and Yagi Kazuo -- and argues that their radical innovations in these ancient arts were, in part, provoked by their sense of a threat posed by Euro-American modernity. The final chapter is devoted to the career of Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, whose feeling of affiliation was directed to both the U.S. and Japan in shifting ratios through a series of public and private places, each posing unique opportunities for exploring national distinctions.
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