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Paper short abstract

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.

Paper long abstract

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