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Okada Kenzo's lyrical abstraction, shaped by Cold War politics, migration, and Orientalist expectations, exposes the power asymmetries of postwar modernism and global art discourse.

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Okada Kenzo (1902–1982) was a Japanese painter whose career illuminates the global and intercultural dimensions of Abstract Expressionism. Trained in Western-style painting in Tokyo and Paris, Okada gained prominence in Japan before emigrating to New York in 1950, where he joined the Betty Parsons Gallery alongside artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. His lyrical abstractions, marked by subtle color harmonies and spatial balance, departed from the aggressive gesturalism of his contemporaries, offering instead a contemplative visual language often linked—sometimes problematically—to Zen aesthetics. Okada’s work challenges the notion of Abstract Expressionism as an exclusively American movement, revealing its transnational and dialogic nature during the Cold War.

Navigating a complex field shaped by Orientalist expectations and Cold War cultural politics, Okada engaged critically with perceptions of “Asian-ness.” While American critics often framed his work through exoticized notions of sensitivity and spirituality, Okada transformed these readings into opportunities to explore ambiguity, balance, and the unseen. His notion of “yūgenism,” derived from the Japanese term yūgen (mystery, depth), articulated an ambition to be seen as both grounded in both Japanese and Western artistic languages. Works such as Number Three (1953) and Memories (1957) embody this negotiation—where geometric abstraction meets atmospheric subtlety, and materiality intertwines with the metaphysical.

Okada’s trajectory intersects with those of other Japanese and Japanese American artists, including Koho Yamamoto, Matsumi “Mike” Kanemitsu, Joseph Goto, and George Miyasaki, who expanded abstraction across media and geography. Together, their works reveal Abstract Expressionism as a network of transnational exchanges shaped by immigration and displacement, institutional racism, and Cold War ideologies. Okada’s work interrogates the fraught intersections of globalism and nationalism, abstraction and figuration, materiality and spirituality within postwar cultural politics. By manipulating tone, space, and silence, he revealed modern painting as a site of transnational negotiation—where questions of visibility, belonging, and otherness expose the persistent asymmetries of power shaping art history’s global narratives.

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This paper analyzes Isozaki Arata’s 1978 exhibition MA as a curatorial and semiotic construction of the in-between, rather than a traditional essence. It argues that the show shaped modern understandings of ma and traces its afterlives in contemporary discourse and transcultural curatorial practice.

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"MA: Espace, Temps au Japon," the exhibition curated by Isozaki Arata in Paris in 1978, played a decisive role in constructing and globalizing the modern understanding of ma 間, commonly translated as “in-between.” Rather than presenting ma as a stable aesthetic essence rooted in Japanese tradition, the exhibition assembled a constellation of heterogeneous materials, including performance, photography, architectural reconstructions and ritual objects. Through this curatorial orchestration, ma emerged as a perceptual and conceptual experience that visitors could inhabit, negotiate and interpret across cultural boundaries.

Isozaki’s intervention can be understood within his broader intellectual formation shaped by engagements with semiotics, rhetoric and the problem of untranslatability, as well as by his dialogue with Roland Barthes and the Parisian intellectual milieu of the 1970s. These contexts illuminate how ma was translated into a semiotic field, prompting reflection on the limits of language and the operations of analogy, metaphor and interval.

To situate the exhibition within a wider discursive landscape, the study traces several modern genealogies of ma that developed in parallel. While national-cultural interpretations of the 1970s/1980s contributed to ma’s image as a marker of Japanese specificity, other philosophical, architectural and cross-cultural approaches reveal the concept’s multiplicity. Drawing on Michael Lucken’s historiographical framework, this paper demonstrates how these divergent formations exemplify ma as a “constructed tradition,” shaped less by origins than by the ongoing production of discourse.

Attention then turns to the afterlives of Isozaki’s project, from partial reconstructions to recent transcultural iterations in Europe and Asia. These contemporary returns of ma show how the concept continues to generate new meanings, new curatorial experiments and new cross-cultural dialogues. In this sense, ma participates in an “eternal return,” reappearing in shifting forms and gaining renewed vitality with each act of reinterpretation.

Reassessing Isozaki’s exhibition within this broader conceptual and historiographical field positions ma not as a fixed cultural inheritance, but as an evolving and contested site of meaning that continues to shape curatorial practice today.

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This paper examines overlooked forms of socially collaborative art in Japan since the 2000s. It introduces “Social but not Public” to describe practices that limit visibility, reframing how cultural practice, civil society and governance intersect in contemporary Japan.

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This presentation examines a neglected dimension of civil society and cultural practice in Japan since the 2000s, through the lens of socially collaborative art. Over the past three decades, social art practice has become a globally prominent form of contemporary art, characterised by artists working with non-artists to experiment with new forms of sociability. In Japan, social art practice has become highly visible since the 1990s through Art Projects (āto purojekuto), which are closely associated with governance agendas of regional revitalisation and encouraging active civic participation. As a result, discourse has tended to treat these highly public forms as representative of social art practice in Japan as a whole.

I challenge this assumption using findings from my recently completed PhD. I argue that alongside highly visible, state-aligned forms of social art practice, there exists a substantial and enduring tendency in Japan that deliberately limits public visibility and accessibility. I develop the concept of ‘Social but not Public’ to characterise practices bearing this tendency, developing the concept by situating artists’ practices in relation to broader transformations in Japanese civil society under socioeconomic conditions of ‘second modernity’. More publicly visible social art practice has been theorised as responding to economic restructuring and demographic decline of second modernity. I show that ‘Social but not Public’ practices emerged from the same conditions but through different trajectories: the reconfiguration of intimate spheres, organised forms of psycho-spatial withdrawal, and artists’ strategic navigation of state-directed publicness. I illustrate these dynamics through case studies of Maemachi Art Center, Takafumi Fukasawa, Keijiro Suzuki and Datsuijo.

I conclude by outlining the wider relevance of Social but not Public practices for Japanese Studies and related disciplines. By foregrounding less visible forms of collectivity, this complements existing social-scientific accounts of more publicly visible forms of civic participation and opens connections to adjacent fields such as community-based welfare, therapeutic group practices and community participatory enterprise. In doing so, I offer a revised understanding of how cultural practice intersects with civil society and governance in contemporary Japan.

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This paper reconsiders the notion of 'Japan' in Japanese art history through the lens of marginalised refugee artists: Vladimir Tamari (1942–2017) and Simko Ahmed (b. 1968). These two case studies reveal ethnonationalism in Japanese art history, which has excluded various minority artists.

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Japanese art history has tended to uphold ethnonational ideologies since its inception. In other words, Japanese art history has generally been thought of as a written history of the cultural expressions of the Japanese people originating in the Japanese archipelago. Within this framework, the creative activities of ethnic minorities, refugees, asylum seekers, stateless people, and immigrants who have settled in Japan have been virtually excluded from conventional Japanese art history. Can we narrate Japanese art history without being constrained by the nationality or ethnicity of its creators? How might Japanese art history appear different if diaspora artists and their works were studied seriously? Ultimately, what constitutes Japanese art history? With these questions in mind, this paper reconsiders the notion of 'Japan' in Japanese art history through the lens of marginalised diaspora artists. In particular, it examines the displaced life and evolving art of Vladimir Tamari (1942–2017) and Simko Ahmed (b. 1968). Born in Palestine, Tamari lost his homeland due to the 1948 Nakba. From 1970 until his ultimate death, Tamari evolved his unique perspective as a diaspora artist by exploring non-representational art in Japan. Ahmed arrived in Japan from Iraqi Kurdistan in 1996. By utilising the resources and networks available to him in Japan, Ahmed generated minor transnationalism with other marginalised artists such as a third-generation zainichi Korean sculptor Ro Fung Sok (b. 1955). Instead of treating these refugee artists as odd exceptions, disconnected from the local Japanese context, this paper sheds light on how their careers and works were deeply embedded in solidarity movements that emerged from Japan. By tracing Tamari and Ahmed’s global migratory journeys and their points of contact with the Japanese art world, this paper argues that émigré artists who fled from colonial violence and dictatorial repression formed a close network with Japanese artists committed to anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Together, they explored an alternative 'internationality' that resonated with global decolonial movements and departed from Euro-American centrism in art. Ultimately, these two case studies lead us to look beyond the conventional framework of Japanese art history, which has excluded various ethnoracial minority artists.

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Genshin (942–1017), a Tendai monk and the author of the Ōjōyōshū, greatly influenced the Japanese Amidist tradition. This study is a preliminary investigation on how Genshin himself was depicted in Japanese True Pure Land art, rather than how Pure Land was portrayed due to his influence.

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Genshin (942–1017), also known as Eshin Sōzu, was a Tendai monk and author of two seminal treatises: the Ichijō yōketsu (Determining the Essentials of the One-vehicle) and the Ōjōyōshū (The Essentials of Rebirth in the Pure Land). The former focusing on the Lotus sutra and theoretical explications about how to reach enlightenment. The latter, instead, provided practical guidance for birth in Amida’s Pure Land. His writings influenced later schools of Japanese Buddhism, especially Pure Land and True Pure Land traditions. Genshin was even elected the first Japanese True Pure Land patriarch by Shinran, the founder of this school. Many are the pieces of Amidist art that are deemed to be influenced by Genshin’s writings, and a few academic papers focus on this subject. This preliminary study, however, begins to investigate how Genshin himself was portrayed in Japanese True Pure Land art rather than how Pure Land was portrayed due to his influence. For instance, in the Kōmyō honzon, he is depicted as a holy patriarch: distinctively dressed, seated on an elevated platform, and surrounded by inscriptions emphasizing his sanctity and near-Buddha status. Conversely, depictions such as the Seven Patriarchs canvas present him in a diminished role: Genshin appears seated on a plain chair, visually subordinate to other figures, reflecting a shift in perception from “saint” to “prestigious monk.” This paper starts investigating how representations of Genshin transformed and evolved alongside changing religious, social, institutional, and historical contexts. In particular, it analyses the link between Buddhist art and how society perceived Buddhism itself, that is to say, whether Buddhism was positively perceived or not by the Japanese people and the Japanese government in specific historical periods. Furthermore, this work aims to reflect on how (True) Pure Land Buddhism used to interact with commoners and, therefore, how this interaction was echoed in visual art.

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I consider two photobooks that address visual impairment—Les Mains pour voir (Hands for seeing, 1999) by Yoshiko Murakami and Sokohi (Shadow at the bottom, 2022) by Moe Suzuki—in terms of a sense of being-with rather than othering evoked through the adjacency of the photographer to the photographed.

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I consider two internationally acclaimed books by Japanese female photographers that directly address visual impairment: Les Mains pour voir (Hands for seeing, 1999) by Yoshiko Murakami, in which photographs of unsighted people whom she had gotten to know through her long-term volunteer work as a guide for the blind are presented, along with poems represented in Braille, French, and English; and Sokohi (Shadow in the bottom, 2022) by Moe Suzuki, which chronicles her father’s gradual loss of sight due to glaucoma through photographs of him with a camera, eyeglasses, eyepatches, and a cane, and also of imagined and reconstructed sightings through his eyes. Murakami and Suzuki’s artworks are not only on the visually impaired but also created with them, so that those in front of the camera function more as co-producers than as objects of observation. The two books thus evoke a sense of sharing or being-with, rather than othering or objectifying. The time spent with those who are visually impaired helps form trust and ease with the photographer, who thus exists for them not only for the camerawork but as a fellow human being. The conversations that took place between the photographed and the photographers give agency to the former and physical presence to the latter. The photographers become emotionally invested in the well-being of the photographed. All these aspects contribute to the creation of a sense of ethical concern that counters any judgment of “colonizing” such as the one that Susan Sontag made toward Diane Arbus.

Vision has been assumed to be “degree zero” for the subject of representation in the optic-centrist regime of our times, as pointed out and critiqued by many, including Merleau-Ponty, McLuhan, DeBord, and Kittler. The reverse side of this domination of vision is the mythicization of the blind as martyrs or superhumanly gifted figures whose insight counters their absence of sight, as formulated by de Man and Derrida. In my study, blindness—or sightedness—is less symbolic than corporeal and social. I consider cases in which vision is not a power behind representation but can itself become an object of visual representation.

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This paper focuses on the last creative period of the surrealist painter Yamashita Kikuji starting from 1970 that is characterised by an intense exploration of Japan’s wartime past, the imperial system, and his personal guilt.

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In 1971, the surrealist painter Yamashita Kikuji (山下菊二, 1919-1986) created the “Anti-Emperor-System Series” juxtaposing imagery from Japan’s wartime past such as Emperor Hirohito in military uniform, line-ups of prisoners, frontline shooting, and scientific devices. These paintings are visually powerful and critically address military ideology, war crimes, and the imperial system in Japan. Yamashita Kikuji is a well-known figure in politically engaged art of the early postwar period and his painting “The Tale of Akebono Village” (1953) is appraised as a landmark work of the reportage movement. Accordingly, there is a range of research covering the artist’s endeavours during his early postwar career, but even after 1970 when artists avoided advocating openly leftist positions, Yamashita continued addressing socio-political issues in his works. Most significantly, he consistently broached his personal guilt and war responsibility not only in his works but also in essays. Born in 1919, Yamashita studied art but then he was drafted in 1939 and stationed in the south China frontline for three years. In the late seventies, he confessed that he was involved in the killing of several Chinese civilians.

Even though Yamashita is a primary witness of the Asia-Pacific War and he repeatedly addressed his traumatic war experiences in his works, aspects of war memory are rarely the focus of research on Yamashita. This presentation complements existing studies by focusing on Yamashita’s works created after 1970, especially his “Anti-Emperor-System Series”. In doing so, I apply the perspective of memory studies to explore how a primary witness dealt with feelings of personal guilt, the military ideology, and the war responsibility of the emperor. Moreover, I am showing that Yamashita’s signature surrealist style was particularly suitable for conveying nightmarish memories and for criticising the persisting socio-political structures.

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This paper examines how Yanagi Sōetsu critically engaged with John Ruskin’s aesthetics in forming his theory of mingei (art of the people). It analyzes the philosophical tension between Ruskin and Yanagi and reassesses the historical relationship between the Arts and Crafts and mingei movements.

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This paper examines how Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) critically engaged with the aesthetic thought of John Ruskin in the formation of his theory of mingei (art of the people), and clarifies the theoretical distance between the Japanese mingei movement and the British Arts and Crafts movement. While these two movements are often understood as parallel reactions against modern industrialization that revalued the beauty of handicraft, Yanagi himself repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with Ruskin and William Morris. This tension has not been fully examined in previous studies.

The paper first reassesses the commonly noted affinities between Morris’s idea of “common things” and Yanagi’s early concept of getemono, later theorized as mingei. Although both thinkers valued ordinary utilitarian objects, Yanagi gradually distanced himself from Morris’s moral and intellectual approach to labor. The paper then turns to Yanagi’s explicit critique of Ruskin, focusing on Ruskin’s tendency to conflate art and craft by demanding that artisans become conscious artists. Drawing on Yanagi’s marginal annotations in Nobuyuki Ōkuma’s Ruskin and Morris as Social Thinkers, this study shows that Yanagi regarded Ruskin’s emphasis on artistic self-consciousness and intellectual cultivation as incompatible with the historical reality of medieval craft production, which Yanagi understood as fundamentally non-reflective and unconscious.

The core argument centers on Yanagi’s reconfiguration of craft aesthetics through the Buddhist concept of tariki-bi (beauty of other-power). By incorporating ideas from religious philosophy—particularly analogies with Pure Land Buddhism and Nishida Kitarō’s notion of “pure experience”—Yanagi theorized that the beauty of mingei emerges not from intentional design or individual artistic will, but from selfless labor in which artisans, freed from ego, become united with nature as a transcendent force. This position contrasts sharply with Ruskin’s and Morris’s valorization of conscious intellectual engagement in labor, a stance closely related to Ruskin’s later notion of a “religion of humanity.”

By elucidating these differences, this paper repositions the mingei movement within the international history of the Arts and Crafts movement, not as a Japanese counterpart, but as a distinct theoretical response that redefined craft aesthetics through an original synthesis of art, religion, and labor.

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Framed by Mbembe’s necropolitics, this paper traces the shift of atomic photography from Domon Ken and Tōmatsu Shōmei to the 1972 photobook Hiroshima, Hiroshima, hírou-ʃímə. I argue this lineage transforms the medium from political evidence into a counter-narrative that actively reimagines trauma.

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As 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Asia-Pacific War, this paper examines the trajectory of nuclear memory through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Drawing on this framework, I position the bombings not merely as military acts, but as the ultimate exercise of sovereign power that reduced the population to bare existence. This forced hibakusha (survivors) into a “death-world”—a liminal existence where the body survives biologically yet remains socially inscribed for a slow death. This research asks: How have photographic practices evolved from documenting these scars to deconstructing the visual language of trauma itself? Rather than viewing these images merely as historical evidence, I trace a critical shift that moves from politicized documentation toward radical self-reflexivity.

The analysis begins with Domon Ken’s Hiroshima (1958), examining how the Realist movement deployed the scarred body to indict state negligence, yet paradoxically constructed a homogenized victimhood that rendered the survivors into a unified national symbol. I then turn to Tōmatsu Shōmei’s 11:02 Nagasaki (1966), which introduced a subjective gaze that complicates how viewers encounter atomic trauma, shifting from the classification of wounded flesh to the haunting persistence of objects and memory.

The progression culminates in the collective photobook Hiroshima, Hiroshima, hírou-ʃímə (1972), produced by the All-Japan Students Photo Association (Zen-Nichi). Emerging from the radicalized student movement of the late 1960s—a generation shaped by the 1960 Anpo protests and disillusioned with both state authority and established left-wing institutions—these photographers rejected the visual conventions of their predecessors. By rejecting both standard Kanji (city) and Katakana (symbol) in favor of a phonetic “third Hiroshima,” they staged a generational rupture. I argue that this mirrors the physical reality of the bomb: just as the explosion reduced the body to debris, this title strips the word “Hiroshima” of its history, reducing a heavy cultural symbol to a raw sound.

Ultimately, this lineage reveals how photography functions as a counter-narrative to state power. By reclaiming the reality of the atomic experience from political instrumentalization, these works demonstrate how photography can disrupt the silence of the death-world, transforming the victimhood into an active, defiant visuality.

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This paper analyzes late Edo “cut-away” prints as “paper peep shows.” By framing the print as a nozoki-karakuri (peep box), I argue that the theatrical “reveal” exposes a body that is simultaneously mechanized (karakuri) and eroticized (shunga), transforming anatomy into popular spectacle.

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The “cut-away” woodblock prints of the late Edo period—ranging from the Inshoku yōjō kagami (Rules of Dietary Life, 1855) to the Fubu no on o shiru zu (Realize One’s Parental Love, 1880)—are frequently categorized as tools for medical popularization. However, this paper argues that their visual rhetoric owes not only to anatomical knowledge development but also to the performative Edo popular culture. I propose that these prints function as “paper peep shows,” utilizing the theatrical logic of the misemono (shows) to stage the interior of the body as a spectacle of revelation.

Framing the “cut-away” skin as a theatrical curtain, this paper analyzes the specific nature of the body revealed by this peep-show gaze. First, I argue that the viewer is invited to peer at a mechanized body. In Rules of Dietary Life, internal organs are depicted as tiny laborers working at different jobs; in pregnancy prints, the fetus is depicted as a distinct component inserted into the womb. I posit that these prints visually treat the body as a karakuri automaton—a machine animated by a hidden “internal mechanism”—thereby engaging a curiosity that disenchants the biological interior into a system of mechanical parts.

Finally, I demonstrate that this “peeping” framework inherently constructs the interior as a desired space. By adopting the voyeuristic visual tropes of shunga (erotic prints), the medical “reveal” provides an alibi for the male gaze, conflating scientific inquiry with sexual curiosity. Ultimately, I demonstrate that by packaging the “mechanized” and “eroticized” body within the visual format of the “peep show,” these prints transformed anatomy into a performative entertainment for the urban popular imagination.

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This paper examines the Tokugawa's use of paintings of warrior chronicles in international diplomacy, with focus on The Tale of the Heike. It reveals what messages the Tokugawa sought to send to foreign audiences through the paintings, and thereby sheds new light on their understanding of the tale.

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This paper examines the Tokugawa bakufu’s use of paintings of warrior chronicles in international diplomacy, with focus on paintings of The Tale of the Heike. It was conventional for the Tokugawa government to present paintings that depicted scenes from medieval warrior chronicles to foreign monarchs as diplomatic gifts. For instance, inventories of official gifts from the Tokugawa shoguns to Korean kings often list Heike folding screens. Similarly, the gifts from the shogun Tokugawa Iesada to King Willem III of the Netherlands in 1856 included screens of battle scenes from several warrior chronicles. Many of these works, some of which are extant, have been studied in previous scholarship, but there are more dimensions to these works that would help us better understand the multifaceted roles that the Tokugawa expected them to play in the diplomatic relationships between Japan and other countries. For instance, the imperial and warrior governments before the Tokugawa did not include paintings of warriors and battles in their official gifts, and it remains to be investigated why the Tokugawa added this genre to their official gifts. I will also analyse what scenes from warrior chronicles the Tokugawa selected for depiction and how they had these scenes rendered in the gift paintings, by investigating these paintings as well as historical documents pertaining to them. I aim to thereby figure out what messages the Tokugawa shoguns sought to convey to foreign audiences through the gift paintings. My investigation spans the wide range of gift paintings and other items that Japanese leaders presented to their counterparts in several countries (e.g. China, Korea, the Netherlands, Britain, France, and the United States) throughout the premodern periods. This investigation will reveal a subtle variation in the Tokugawa’s use of warrior paintings in different contexts, and my interpretation of this subtlety against the background of international diplomacy will in turn shed new light on the Tokugawa’s understanding of warrior chronicles, and The Tale of the Heike in particular.

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Nakamura Hiroshi sustained a realist commitment through figurative painting across Japanese postwar art history. This research examines his innovations and shifts in the mid-1960s, revealing how they restructured avant-garde realism as a problem of visuality, perception, and mediation.

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This research traces the shift in Nakamura Hiroshi’s (中村宏 b. 1932) paintings from the ‘site’ to the ‘vision’ after the mid-1960s, with particular attention to recurring motifs such as the telescope, windows, steam trains, cyclops, and uniformed schoolgirls consolidated during this period. These works are often labelled as surrealist, montage, or quasi-pop art. Beyond brief stylistic categorizations, the ways in which Nakamura continued to work through the problem of realism rather than abandoning it remain obscure but central to his artistic pursuit. While Nakamura was one of the few artists in the 1960s Japanese avant-garde scene who continued to paint figuratively, his practice underwent a visible shift from early reportage approach, cynicism, and what Doryun Chong describes as the “metaphorical and allegorical” toward more abstract symbols and inward inquiry into the complex mechanisms of vision itself. This paper traces the continuity and transition, situating the post-1960 paintings not as a rupture but as a self-renewal and critical reorientation of realist painting.

The presentation focuses on Nakamura’s transition toward conceptual painting (観念絵画), examines shifts in color usage, iconography, and composition, as well as his formulation of the “tableau machine” (タブロオ機械) and activities of the Kankō Geijutsu Kenkyūjo (観光芸術研究所) with Tateishi Taiga, as frameworks for redefining painting in relation to changing social context and conditions of subjecthood and mediation. The central question focuses on how Nakamura reoriented his realist commitment from direct social engagement and actual sites and incidents to a later mode that operates through perceptual structures, polyfocal vision, and symbolic forms. Rather than reading these developments as retreat or departure from realism, this paper argues that Nakamura reinvented his approach to realism as a structural problem of visuality. In doing so, the anchoring function of realism shifted from claims to immediate documentation and affective witness to critical analyses of how visual perception interacts with social reality.

The presentation concludes by briefly considering Nakamura’s recent war-memory paintings since 2022, suggesting that his revisit of the war subject further complicates the long trajectory of realism in his painting career, articulating a continuous artistic inquiry.

Keywords: Nakamura Hiroshi, postwar art history, realism, avant-garde

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This paper examines the symbolic and cultural significance of tenshō karuta in early modern Japan, tracing their shift from imported playing cards to motifs of Nanban taste in painting and decorative arts, and revealing processes of adaptation and cultural syncretism.

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The tenshō karuta—playing cards derived from European prototypes introduced via the Nanban trade in the late sixteenth century—offer a compelling example of cultural translation and artistic adaptation in early modern Japan. Beyond their role as imported novelties, these cards exemplify how foreign objects could be reinterpreted, aestheticized, and invested with new meanings within Japanese visual and material culture. While extant Edo-period karuta sets are rare, their presence endures through written and pictorial sources, particularly in genre painting (kinsei shoki fūzokuga). These images have long been approached as documentary evidence, valued for their perceived fidelity to historical games or social contexts. Yet such empiricist readings have overlooked the symbolic and art-historical dimensions of the karuta motif itself.

This paper reconsiders tenshō karuta not as literal representations of play but as visual signs shaped through layers of cultural meaning. In early modern painting, motifs rarely served as records of reality; rather, they functioned as gadai—thematic and symbolic subjects that mediated between lived practice and artistic convention—and often evolved into recurring decorative patterns (mon’yō). By tracing the trajectory of the karuta motif from the pictorial to the decorative realm, this study reveals its transformation from a signifier of exotic amusement to an emblem of auspiciousness and Nanban taste.

Methodologically, the paper treats these depictions as symbolic constructs, analyzed within their contexts of production and reception. Drawing on nearly the entire corpus of tenshō karuta representations in early genre painting, it situates them within broader discourses of taste, fortune, and cultural hybridity. A detailed examination of the Matsuura byōbu further illuminates the intersection of pleasure-quarter imagery and Nanban aesthetics. Finally, the study traces the motif’s migration into the applied arts—particularly lacquerware and ceramics—where karuta assumed a stable decorative identity. Through this lens, the tenshō karuta emerge as a key site of visual syncretism, marking the formation of a distinctly Japanese response to the aesthetic challenges and possibilities of cultural encounter.

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Members of the naturalist circle Shabenkai developed the knowledge of fish by interacting with scholars within and beyond the circle in the mid-19th century. A shogunal physician Kurimoto Tanshū’s knowledge and his unpublished illustrated manuscripts on the subject were transferred to the circle.

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From the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the production of fish catalogues flourished in Japan. With increasing interest in flora and fauna from medical, encyclopaedic and artistic perspectives, the fish attracted both professional and amateur naturalists. Shabenkai (the Association of the Red Rod), an amateur naturalist circle in Edo was not an exception. The circle's members closely interacted with a shogunal physician Kurimoto Tanshū (1756-1834), who compiled an illustrated fish catalogue known as Ritsushi gyofu. This unpublished catalogue had a great influence on later catalogues such as Hakubutsukan gyofu (Illustrations of Fish Species Compiled by the Museum Bureau).

In 2025, the Chester Beatty acquired illustrated manuscripts of 33 fish and sea animals donated by the family of Denis Joseph Corish (1925-2024), Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Bowdoin College, Maine. The manuscripts were likely compiled by Tamaru Naonobu, a shogunate official and a member of Shabenkai. The set includes copies of manuscripts written by Tanshū and another Shabenkai member, Shidara Sadatomo (1785-?). The manuscripts show layers of motivation and interest in illustrating and describing sea creatures: naming the unfamiliar, recording the history and context of encounters, curiosity about their physical characteristics and their origins, and preventing food poisoning.

This paper explores the process of knowledge building on fish at the end of the Edo period by examining the Chester Beatty's manuscripts as 'a witness' to the discovery of strange fish at Japanese coasts, contemporary scholarly discussions and the production of fish catalogues around the Tempō era (1830-44). Comparing with Ritsushi gyofu, Kōwa gyofu, and Hakubutsukan gyofu, it also analyses the modification and adaptation of Tanshū's fish painting at different stages. The manuscripts at the Chester Beatty not only trace knowledge transfer between Shabenkai members but also among scholars and physicians serving the shognate and domains beyond the circle. This study enriches the understanding of Shabenkai members' activity outside their formal meetings.

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The history of Japanese art collections in Polish museums reflects the evolution of Polish – Japanese cultural relations. This paper aims to explore ceramic vessels both as art objects and as significant cultural texts within the process of the reception of Japanese culture in Poland.

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Collecting Japanese art in Poland has a long and fascinating history. Its origins can be traced to collections of lacquerware (urushi) and Imari porcelain that adorned the interiors of palaces and residences, amassed by prominent aristocratic families, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A subsequent stage developed at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when, alongside the growing interest in Japan in Western Europe, opportunities for intensive direct and indirect contact with Japanese culture also emerged in Poland, which at that time did not exist as an independent state. Japanese art became increasingly accessible, and artefacts representing its diverse forms appeared in relatively large numbers both in museum collections and in the hands of private collectors. Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and militaria predominated, although various types of ceramics, not only porcelain, also attracted considerable interest. The most important figure in the reception of Japanese culture in Poland during this period was the collector Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński, whose holdings consisted primarily of an extensive collection of high-quality woodblock prints, but also included Japanese decorative arts, among them ceramics.

Objects owned by the Polish aristocracy and private collectors largely entered Polish museum collections as deposits, gifts, or purchases. Today, the largest holdings are preserved in museums with national status, primarily the National Museum in Kraków and the National Museum in Warsaw. Significant collections are also housed in royal palaces and aristocratic residences, such as the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów and Wawel Royal Castle – the State Art Collection in Kraków.

This paper aims to explore ceramic vessels and to analyse them both as art objects and as significant cultural texts within the broader process of the reception of Japanese culture in Poland.

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This paper examines Tsuneko Kondō Kawase’s role as a mediator of Slovene-Japanese exchange, focusing on her activities in the Slovenian art scene of the 1950s and her connections with Slovene artists through correspondence and other archival materials.

Paper long abstract

Tsuneko Kondō Kawase (1893–1963) was a prominent figure in presenting and transmitting Japanese culture in Slovenia and played an important role in fostering early Slovene-Japanese cultural dialogue before formal frameworks for such exchange were established. Particularly significant were her lectures offering insights into the lives of Japanese women, customs, and traditions; her broad involvement in women’s organizations in Slovenia and beyond; and her role in caring for and preserving the Skušek Collection before it became public, now recognized as the largest collection of East Asian artifacts in Slovenia.

This presentation aims to uncover yet another, less-explored dimension of her activity within the Slovenian cultural milieu, focusing on her involvement in the Slovenian artistic scene of the 1950s. During this period, she served as a mediator between Slovenian and Japanese artists, most notably Bojan Golija (1932–2014), a Slovenian graphic artist and art educator who traveled to Japan in 1957 for a six-month study program. As one of the first postwar Yugoslav students to do so, he was deeply influenced by Japanese aesthetics and pedagogical approaches to graphic art. The analysis will examine documents that testify to their relationship, primarily their correspondence preserved in the archive of the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, as well as documents and photographs from Golija’s personal archive.

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Paper short abstract

This paper traces a transnational ecofeminist genealogy of contemporary Japanese artworks in which body-landscape metamorphosis becomes a strategy of empathetic identification with non human life, challenging idealized conceptions of nature associated with Japanese tradition.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers an ecofeminist approach to contemporary Japanese art through the motif of body-landscape metamorphosis as a mode of empathetic identification with non-human life.

The works of Ikemura Lieko, Muta Yoca, Konoike Tomoko and Matsui Fuyuko present a broad spectrum of aesthetic and conceptual strategies in which the human body appears as a porous and vulnerable site, entangled with environmental forms. These practices unsettle inherited cultural imaginaries of an idealized nature associated with harmony, beauty and emotional refuge and foreground experiences of discomfort, strangeness, care and shared exposure.

The paper proposes a genealogical reading that situates these artists within a wider field of feminist and posthumanist thought concerned with the continuity of living processes and the dissolution of anthropocentric subjectivity.

The study articulates several conceptual axes which allow the identification of recurrent patterns in recent Japanese visual culture. These processes are especially visible in the work of women artists, where metamorphosis emerges as a critical vision opened up through the body.

The artists discussed in this study occupy an increasingly visible place within Japanese institutional landscape, with exhibition and support that reveal tensions around gender and ecology in current curatorial narratives. Their practices function as a reference framework through which other contemporary creators can be traced, extending a constellation of proposals that expands beyond the individual cases examined here.

This paper forms part of a collective volume that I have edited, which brings together contributions from ten authors and addresses ecofeminist perspectives in contemporary Japan from interdisciplinary angles. the chapter presented here draws on sustained research, including interviews and fieldwork un the institutional circuits in which their work circulates.

The aim of this study is to contribute to a situated, non-Eurocentric genealogy that highlights how Japanese women artists articulate new ways of thinking nature.

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Kabuki and ukiyo-e print making thrived as interdependent commercial entertainment industries. Using the Deleuzian rhizome concept, this talk maps lateral networks of publishers, print artists, actors, theaters, and buyers, arguing that their symbiotic relationship shaped artistic innovation

Paper long abstract

While ukiyo-e prints and kabuki theater are today celebrated as “high art” and UNESCO-recognized cultural heritage, during the Edo period both functioned primarily as commercial entertainment industries. This presentation analyzes their co-dependent production ecologies through the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome, a non-hierarchical system of multi-directional nodes. It maps the sociomaterial networks connecting theaters, star actors, publishers, designers, and pleasure-district economies with the urban buyers of these products.

The print production process extended well beyond the classic “woodblock quartet” (publisher, artist, carver, printer). Rather than prioritizing the artist, this study identifies the publisher as the key coordinator of creative labor and market logistics. Publishers curated professional relationships, assessed commercial risk, optimized “time-to-market” strategies, and defined product USPs for large, trend-driven audiences. Choices concerning design complexity, material luxury, and color layering were frequently commercial decisions shaping artistic output, not vice versa.

Because more than 50% of ukiyo-e referenced kabuki, printmaking was intrinsically linked to the commercials of kabuki theater. Despite vast audiences, theaters operated under precarious financial conditions due to exorbitant star salaries and large workforces. Constant marketing was required to maintain reliable revenue streams. Star actors likewise curated their public images so not to be surpassed by rivals. Poetry circles and fan clubs functioned as secondary performance arenas where publishers and print artists were often directly embedded, developing profitable sources for private edition surimono prints. Related enterprises, such as tea houses, also served as popular subjects. In this symbiotic marketing ecosystem, printmaking was both an essential promotional tool and a robust industry in its own right.

Kabuki prints were frequently speculative: many appeared before premieres when sets or costumes had not been finalized, while others depicted “dream casts” or imaginary glances into the actors’ private lives. Buyers valued these images less for realism than for affiliation value and social capital, sustaining a profitable feedback loop between theaters, actor-celebrities, and print entrepreneurs.

By tracing the kabuki-print rhizome as a complex symbiotic system, this paper demonstrates how commercial infrastructures enabled artistic innovation while shaping urban identity and non-elite cultural agency in Edo Japan.

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Paper short abstract

This paper frames Edo-period vernacular exhibition practices as autonomous and theoretically generative systems of presentation, bearing epistemic, performative, and sociological significance. Drawing on printed media, it examines exhibition modalities governing object and audience relations.

Paper long abstract

Through the examination of printed media, including travelogues, diaries, and a variety of picture books, this paper frames vernacular exhibition practices of the Edo period (1603–1868) as autonomous and theoretically generative systems of presentation. By focusing on culturally distinctive environments and locations such as kaichō 開帳 (temporary unveilings of religious objects), misemono 見世物 (popular street festivals, attractions and performances), shop windows, or even bathhouses, the paper advances a theory of vernacular display that both expands on the conceptual frameworks of museum studies and emphasises the cultural dimensions of exhibition in a global context. In exploring these matters, it provides a reconceptualisation of Edo-period attitudes toward exhibition, presentation, and display, highlighting its epistemic, performative, and sociological significance, much prior to Japan's later self-induced national modernisation projects and the establishment of the first and Western-modelled museums. Subsequently, it addresses critical and largely unresolved questions, encompassing the nature of the objects exhibited, the manner in which their inherent object status is temporarily conditioned by their presentation, and, crucially, the recurring exhibition modalities implemented in their display. Particular attention is devoted to practices that incorporate presentation media such as elevations or fabric-covered platforms, as well as spatial organisational strategies that govern object proximity or audience flow.

The paper links art historical examinations with urban, social and anthropological research by demonstrating how these exhibition practices functioned in conjunction with their vernacular environments. This examination highlights the epistemic and performative significance of presentation, emphasising how space itself, and in its modified state, can function as a medium through which objects, images or ideas can be showcased and staged. Within this framework, the objects on display, ranging from utilitarian items and commodities to ritual artefacts, become carriers of relational signification if their presentation is intended as such. Finally, it intervenes in global exhibition studies by challenging narratives that privilege Western models, emphasising the intricacy and agency of Edo-period Japan’s vernacular modalities of display.

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Stylistic and linguistic details in the illustrated handscroll the Book of Acolytes raise questions around its presumed firm date of 1321. I suggest that the work is a 17th century product assembled from various preexisting illustrated sources to appeal to early modern viewers.

Paper long abstract

The illustrated handscroll the Book of Acolytes (Chigo no sōshi) survives as the most explicit depiction of male-male sexual practices among the Buddhist clergy. Its colophon notes that it was made as a copy of a now-lost original in 1321, making it the earliest erotic shunga painting in Japan. As such, the Book of Acolytes forms a crucial source for understanding the history of gender, sexuality and the development of Japanese erotic art. However, close analysis of both linguistic and stylistic details of the work renders this date problematic. I argue that rather than surviving as an unaltered original work, the handscroll is likely an assemblage of pre-existing illustrations compiled as a single scroll in the 17th century, with its literary content added at that time. By reconsidering the Book of Acolytes as an early modern anthology of erotic illustrations, the work reflects how early modern viewers understood medieval romances between Buddhist monks and temple acolytes.

Despite its importance to both art history and gender studies, specialists in medieval Japanese art have largely overlooked the work due to necessity—the painting remains held in secret at Daigo-ji and has not been shown to researchers since the early 20th century. As only three fragmentary photographs of Daigo-ji’s scroll have been published, recent scholarship relies on later copies of the work. Through a close examination of anachronisms present in all three surviving copies—and presumably Daigo-ji’s original—I argue that these details point to the work being an assemblage of unrelated fragments. Furthermore, I demonstrate the unusual nature of the Book of Acolytes by comparing it to the Buddhist depictions of male-male sexual practices in the Keiran shūyōshū (1318) as well as the secular romances from the anthology Rock Azaleas (1676). I conclude that the Book of Acolytes was compiled out of an interest in collecting medieval romances that highlighted eroticism over any Buddhist interpretations. By including a medieval date within the painting, early modern artists created an erotic fantasy of the past, imagining the historical romances between monks and acolytes in ways that appealed to early-modern erotic sensibilities.

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The Manggha Museum of Japanese Art & Technology collection includes a unique red kimono. This garment is depicted in one of the most iconic paintings of Polish Japonism, Józef Pankiewicz's “Japanese Women” (1908). The presentation discusses analogue and digital methods for reconstructing the kimono.

Paper long abstract

The Manggha Museum of Japanese Art & Technology in Kraków houses a unique red kimono in its collection. This garment is depicted in one of the most iconic paintings of Polish Japonism, "Japanese Women" by Józef Pankiewicz (1908). We can hypothesise that the kimono played a significant role in the reception of Japanese art in Central Europe. Once an inspiration for painters, the kimono now serves as a foundation for research into traditional Japanese clothing. Through collaboration between the Manggha Museum and the Polish-Japanese Academy of IT, the kimono is being physically and digitally reconstructed.

Additionally, a media presentation of this object is in development. The original garment is crafted from rinzu silk, hand-woven in a damask weave. This technique creates a striking contrast between the shiny background and the matte pattern. The decoration features a geometric sayagata pattern, enhanced by bouquets of orchids and chrysanthemums. Notably, this type of kimono, known as an uchikake, is not worn with a sash, allowing the rich decoration and delicate patterns to adorn the entire garment. The uchikake in this collection is a wedding outfit. Another kimono with the same pattern, but in black and dating back to the early 19th century, is part of the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Additional examples can be found in the collection of Joshibi University of Art and Design in Tokyo. Contemporary museums are incorporating augmented reality (AR), digital 3D models, touch screens, high-resolution LED displays, and interactive installations to enhance their exhibits. This approach enables them to superimpose digital content onto physical artefacts and utilise animations and virtual reconstructions of objects. The collaboration mentioned above aims to create digital applications focused on Jasieński's kimono. As this work progresses, a key research question is whether digitising tangible cultural heritage may dilute the richness and significance of the traditional practices associated with physical artefacts.

The authors of the presentation plan to analyse both physical and digital conservation methods and to explore the principles that should guide designers in digitally processing phenomena and objects of cultural heritage significance.

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This paper uses semiotics as an analytical tool to examine how Chadō’s ritual sequence is re-signified in contemporary contexts. It identifies recurring patterns of meaning shift across architecture, ceramics, and XR-based media, showing how Chadō’s signs are simplified, translated, or reactivated.

Paper long abstract

Chadō, the Japanese tea practice, is a culturally situated system whose meanings are continually re-signified in response to social change. This paper explores Chadō as a structured system of space, gesture, and objects that produces meaning through participation. The analysis treats spatial organisation, choreographed gestures, temporal pacing, and utensils as interdependent sign systems. It uses a semiotic approach as both an analytical and diagnostic tool. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic relation of sign, object, and interpretant, the paper analyses traditional tea practice and its contemporary reinterpretations, revealing shifts in meaning as Chadō is shaped by processes of modernisation, globalisation, and cultural mediation. The analysis focuses on specific case studies in contemporary architecture, ceramics, and XR media, examining how signs are translated outside of their original contexts. These translations may reduce, transform, or complement the original meanings of the practice. The paper asks under what conditions contemporary reinterpretations instrumentalise the practice’s signs, and under what conditions they support meaningful cultural translation.

The presentation will discuss design-oriented principles for reinterpreting Chadō across the case studies presented, outlining approaches that avoid reducing meaning and instead complement or extend it. By doing so, the paper contributes a comparative framework for designers and cultural practitioners working with ritual heritage across physical and digital media.

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Paper short abstract

Analysis of dolls and three‑dimensional portraits in early modern Japan as ontologically active images that extend the visual culture of the ‘floating world’ beyond two-dimensionality through the application of embodied, performative theories of image‑agency.

Paper long abstract

This paper foregrounds three‑dimensional portraits and dolls as primary sources for a more complete understanding of seventeenth‑century Japanese images of urban entertainment which takes into account their ontological potential. Existing scholarship isolates ukiyo‑e as a predominantly visual, two‑dimensional genre; however, contemporaneous narratives and artefacts show that viewers engaged images as volumetric presences capable of activation. The doll-like reproduction of the courtesan Yoshino in Saikaku’s Koshoku ichidai onna (1688)—described as moving its mouth, limbs, and eyes “ningen no gotoshi”—and the carved wooden lover in the preface to Chikamatsu’s Naniwa miyage (1738) demonstrate that sculptural likenesses were not decorative supplements but effective substitutes for living bodies.

Such artefacts operated within the same ontological field as intrusive painted images such as the portrait that steps out of its painted outline in Aoki Rosui’s Otogi hyaku monogatari (1706), or the actor Nakamura Shichisaburō materializing from his hanging scroll portrait in Furyū kagami ga ike (1709). Three‑dimensional figures intensified this continuum by occupying real space. Their bodies matched the narrative logic that also governed aspirational hanging portraits—such as the painted likeness of the courtesan Moshio commissioned in Ejima Kiseki’s Keisei kintanki (1711)—which acted as surrogates sustaining presence in the sitter’s absence.

The paper argues that these works expose a performative ontology grounded in activation rather than mimesis. Ritualized interaction—offering sake to a portrait, chanting a sitter’s name before an image, or engaging through touch—constituted the mechanism through which viewers animated representations. This model aligns with broader early modern accounts of utsushi as the transfer of presence, and with contemporaneous discussions of ki and katachi that described numinous forms as condensations of life‑energy.

By situating dolls, puppets, and sculptural portraits at the center of the visual culture of the ‘floating world’, this study dismantles the assumed hierarchy privileging two‑dimensional formats. The result is an expanded corpus in which materiality, volume, and bodily encounter define image agency. These artefacts demonstrate an “aesthetics of animation” of the floating world as a cross‑media phenomenon, and that early modern Japanese image‑theory relied on deliberate permeability between living bodies and their representations.

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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines the various expressions surrounding “manga” in the magazine Hosun, situating them within the broader trends of art in late Meiji period. This shed light on a facet of the history of "manga" and confront the universal question of what constituted “art” in modern Japan.

Paper long abstract

The magazine Hosun was launched in May 1907 and published a total of 35 issues until its final issue in July 1911. It was a magazine of literature and art. Hosun was published by Ishii Hakutei as editor and publisher, attracting many painters from the Taiheiyo Gakai (Pacific Art Society), such as Yamamoto Kanae and Morita Tsunetomo. Hosun demonstrated a strong commitment to expressing the group's clearly defined artistic direction through the medium of “printmaking.” This concept was embodied in the expressive technique of “creative printmaking,” where the artist personally handled all three processes—drawing, carving, and printing—unlike traditional printmaking, which relied on a division of labor. It was inevitable that such a focus on the genre of "manga" emerged within the pages of Hosun. However, the issue of “manga” in this magazine remains insufficiently examined. This presentation examines in detail the various pictorial and textual expressions surrounding “manga” in the magazine Hosun, situating them within the trends of art in late Meiji period. This shed light on a facet of the history of "manga" since the modern era and confront the universal question of what constituted “art” in modern Japan.

Specifically, this presentation examines the various expressions of pictorial writing in the “Special Manga Issue” (February 1909) of Hosun vol. 3-2. First, this presentation examines the connections to the French literary magazine Cocorico, previously noted as an influence on Hosun, while also considering broader trends in European art and literature. Furthermore, drawing on statements by contributors in other issues of Hosun, this presentation reaffirms the significance of “manga” within Hosun. It then situates Hosun's orientation toward “manga” within the broader artistic trends of the late Meiji period, marked by the establishment of the Ministry of Education Art Exhibition. The conclusion argues that Hosun's "manga" was unique in its pursuit of an alternative expressive space at the level of subject matter and form, emerging at a time when “art” as an institution was being formed alongside the founding of the Ministry of Education Art Exhibition.

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The introduction of Public-Private Partnerships is advancing in Japan's cultural facilities, but concerns are being raised about excessive commercialisation. This study discusses these issues, through qualitative research, focusing on the case of Tottori Prefectural Museum of Art.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, the operation of public spaces and facilities through public-private partnerships (PPP, Private Finance Initiative) has become increasingly prevalent in Japan. Among these, the mechanism for operating cultural facilities such as museums via PFI (Private Finance Initiative) stands as one of the prime examples of PPP. These schemes involve the design, construction, maintenance, and operation of public spaces and facilities being carried out using private capital and expertise, thereby forming municipal public facilities through “privately built and privately operated (Minsetsu Minei)” arrangements.

However, whilst this system is introduced with the aim of providing equivalent or superior public services at lower cost, it also harbours several problems, such as the commercialisation of artistic programming. In the UK, where PFI was first introduced globally, problems such as excessive profit-seeking by private operators and the deferral of government and local authority debt became apparent. Consequently, in 2012, new, more sustainable and transparent public-private partnerships such as PF2 (Private Finance 2) were introduced. New PFI projects have since drastically decreased and are being phased out.

Previous research on the relationship between museums and capitalism has examined the social power dynamics of museums, pointing to issues such as comprehensive commercialisation rather than focusing on operational system challenges or regional specificities (e.g., Bishop 2013). This study fills that gap. This paper specifically addresses issues in Japan, centring on the Tottori Prefectural Museum of Art, which was the first regional public art museum to introduce PFI. The museum is operated by curators from the Tottori Prefecture, while a Special Purpose Company (SPC) handles design, construction, operation, maintenance, and publicity. Comparing this case with two urban examples from Osaka and Aichi Prefectures, which possess different characteristics, this study employs qualitative research through focused ethnography, interviews, and participant observation to elucidate the impact of public-private partnership systems for cultural facilities on the expressive domain.

Through these, this paper discusses issues of publicness and exclusion surrounding arts culture in within Japan's post-Fordist society, opening up possibilities for broader debate on these issues.

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This paper examines Yayoi Kusama’s novels and poetry as an integral part of her artistic practice. It argues that writing functioned as an intermedial continuation of her performances and installations, translating visual strategies of repetition, excess, and dissent into language.

Paper long abstract

Yayoi Kusama is internationally recognized as a leading figure of postwar and contemporary visual art. Alongside her installations, sculptures, and performances, however, she has also produced an extensive body of literary work, including novels, prose fragments, manifestos, and poetry that she continues to publish today. This paper argues that Kusama’s writing should be understood as an integral component of her artistic practice, rather than as a secondary or explanatory supplement to her visual work.

Focusing on the period from her New York years (1958–1973) to her post-return activity in Japan, I examine how Kusama’s artistic strategies migrated across media. In New York, her public happenings and body-based actions developed in close dialogue with anti-war activism, feminist movements, and queer visibility. After her return to Japan in the late 1970s, literature became a new site where comparable artistic concerns could be articulated under different institutional conditions. Writing did not replace visual practice but operated alongside it, extending its conceptual and formal logic.

Through close analysis of Manhattan Suicide Addict (1978) and The Hustlers’ Grotto of Christopher Street (1983), together with selected poems from different stages of Kusama’s career, this paper demonstrates how her writing adopts visual and performative principles such as repetition, seriality, fragmentation, and bodily excess. In prose, these elements produce unstable narrative structures that resist closure and coherence. In poetry, they appear as rhythmic insistence and condensed verbal repetition, creating a linguistic analogue to the spatial and temporal experience of her installations.

Methodologically, the paper situates Kusama’s literary production within art-historical discussions of intermediality, performance, and postwar avant-garde practices. By reading writing as a form of artistic action, it reframes Kusama’s oeuvre as a continuous field in which image, body, and language operate through shared strategies. This perspective allows us to reconsider how visual artists use text not merely as documentation or commentary, but as a material and performative medium in its own right.

Keywords: Yayoi Kusama; visual art; performance; poetry; postwar avant-garde; gender, contemporary art

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Paper short abstract

The present paper draws attention to Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920), a remarkable Japanese artist, with a focus on his woodblock prints in the ko-tanzaku format. While Gekkō tackled in his prints a variety of subjects he also utilized many different formats including the challenging narrow ko-tanzaku.

Paper long abstract

The present paper draws attention to Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920), a remarkable Japanese artist, with a focus on his colour woodblock prints in the ko-tanzaku format.

Gekkō, a central figure in the Japanese art scene during the Meiji and Taishō (1912–1926) eras, enjoyed great popularity with the public in his lifetime and was widely recognized for his talent and for his impressive oeuvre spanning illustrations for newspapers, books, and magazines to colour woodblock prints and paintings.

Much of Gekkō’s success as a print designer lay in the fact that his works covered a wide variety of genres, demonstrating his great versatility and ability to easily cater to the tastes and interests of the public at the time. In addition, not only did he embrace a variety of subjects, but he also utilized many different formats. Thus, besides the more usual ōban (approximately 38 × 25.4 cm) – sometimes used to form diptychs or triptychs – and the mid-size chūban (approximately 25.5 × 19 cm), he also explored the more atypical shikishiban (approximately 23 × 20.5 cm) and the ko-tanzaku (approximately 36 × 6 cm) formats.

By tackling the challenging long and narrow ko-tanzaku (small poem-slip) format, masterfully addressed earlier in the Edo period (1603–1868) by some of the greatest ukiyo-e artists, Ogata Gekkō distinguished himself from his contemporaries who did not work in this format.

The artist showed extraordinary creativity in designing his many vertical compositions in this demanding format, referencing a fascinating world of legendary and mythological figures and creatures, animals, depictions of beautiful women, or daily-life scenes, all infused with an abundance of Japanese symbols and motifs.

Although Ogata Gekkō himself has been acknowledged only to a limited extent, his stunning woodblock prints in the ko-tanzaku format remain underexplored in scholarship.

Keywords: Ogata Gekkō, Meiji era, woodblock print

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Paper short abstract

In this paper the author would like to investigate the role of Japanese historic textile print design as a medium for art and literature, taking on a work of Santō Kyōden by the title Komon Ganwa <The elegant stories on komon [fabric patterns]> first published in 1790 as a starting point.

Paper long abstract

Komon Ganwa <The elegant stories on komon [fabric patterns]>, by Santō Kyōden, published in 1790 was a best- selling book from the /mitate-bon/ genre, engaging the reader/viewer into various visual puns and allusions based on textile patterns. Kyōden, a skilled literati and merchant, based his work on a long existing tradition of intertwining the writing and visual elements on a single plane.

The aim of the paper is to investigate on how the centuries long tradition of merging text and image is reflected in textile design which in turn serves as a medium for art and literature.

The main points the presentations are as follows.

Historical background and sources

First examples of such works, such as uta-e, where the text of poem accompanied by the visual representation of its subject matter, can be traced to Heain period.

In later periods, the means of embedding the text and meaning into visual representations were not confined solely to literary works, but were utilized in arts and crafts as well. This approach can be found among lacquerwork (maki-e) and textile design which is the main interest of this paper. Such examples will be discussed in the presentation.

The aspect of Edo period print culture (Edo Shuppan Bunka)

The increased literacy during the Edo period enabled the wider audience the access to the written word and created a market for culture mass-consumption aimed at bourgeoisie. This included ukiyo-e prints and book printing, enabling circulation of several copies instead of singular, unique specimens. Kyōden took advantage of those two achievements, being both the writer and illustrator of his books.

De-coding the pattern

For an untrained eye, the patterns could be perceived solely as ornaments, but oftentimes they carried hidden meanings, that could be deciphered and bring new associations. Such examples can be found in hanjimono (puzzle) prints and textile designs associated with famous kabuki theatre actors. The presentation will highlight the use of similar devices in Komon Ganwa.

Keywords: Santō Kyōden, visual literacy, textile design, Edo print culture, mitate

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Paper Proposal Learning from the West: Shiba Kōkan (1747-1818) and His Vision of Europe Chin-Sung Chang (Seoul National University) chin-sungchang@hotmail.com

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Paper Proposal

Learning from the West: Shiba Kōkan (1747-1818) and His Vision of Europe

Chin-Sung Chang (Seoul National University)

chin-sungchang@hotmail.com

A passionate admirer of European art and civilization, Shiba Kōkan emerged as the first outstanding Japanese exponent of painting in the Western manner in late Edo Japan (1615-1868). He introduced the technique of copperplate etching, making a significant contribution to the development of Japanese graphic arts. His pictures in oils laid the foundation for Japanese Western-style painting. Furthermore, he held enthusiasm and respect for European cultural and scientific achievements. His acquisition of any and all Western learning enabled him to establish himself as one of the eminent scholars of Western science. His meeting with the Dutch scholar and merchant-trader Isaac Titsingh (1745-1812) in Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1780 or 1782 radically transformed his life. Discontent with the values and mores of his own society, he began to study Western pictorial techniques. He fashioned himself as the most eminent advocate of Western painting and called himself “the Western painter from the eastern capital.” Divorcing himself from the mainstream of Tokugawa life, he became a nonconformist in insular and xenophobic Edo Japan. In this talk, I will explore the ways in which Kōkan fashioned his self and identity as a painter in the Western manner and occupied a unique place in his culture and how his self-promotion as the master of Western painting had an enormous impact on the modernization of Japan.

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This presentation centers on Ehon Kotori Tsugai (1805) by the Osaka artist Nichōsai. Examining his satirical use of “pairing” (tsugai), I argue Nichōsai elevated earlier Toba-e, creating an intricate proto-manga format that challenges Edo-centric narratives of Japanese comic art.

Paper long abstract

Global popularity of manga has spurred interest in its early modern roots, yet the historical narrative still remains Edo-centric, thereby overlooking distinct comic traditions of Osaka. This paper focuses on the work of Nichōsai (c. 1750–1803), a marginalized figure who helped bridge the gap between earlier Toba-e caricature art and modern manga. Using the posthumous Ehon Kotori Tsugai (A Picture-Book of the Old Bird’s Paired Sketches, 1805), I examine how Nichōsai used distinct “pairings” (tsugai) to elevate caricature from physical distortion to structural social satire.

The book’s title plays with the artist’s pen name (“Old Bird”) and the act of pairing. As he writes in his preface, Nichōsai works as a “prudent matchmaker,” forcing disparate elements of early modern society into comic symmetry. Visual and textual binaries such as “Auspicious” (shūgi) versus “Inauspicious” (bushūgi), or “The Bold” versus “The Timid” demonstrate how Nichōsai deconstructs social performativity. In his hands, a solemn wedding devolves into a critique of gluttony, while elsewhere three samurai cowering before a garden snail exposes the hollowness of the warrior class.

Unlike the physical exaggeration of earlier Toba-e, Nichōsai’s pairings present early modern sensibilities through a modern visual medium of illustrated narratives, including sequential stories accompanied with speech captions. Situating Ehon Kotori Tsugai within the intellectual networks of Osaka’s danna (merchant-patron) culture and aesthetics, I argue that Nichōsai’s work is a distinctive part of the “Osaka Giga” lineage, as shaped by the artist’s wit and humanism. I ultimately hope to demonstrate that the long roots of manga were as firmly intertwined in the merchant culture of Osaka as they were in the floating world of Edo.