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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.