Session Name: Contested Borders and Heritages in Contemporary Art in Asia
1 - Staging the Nation and Its Divided Genealogies in Contemporary Japanese Art
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract Despite its peripheral location in Asia’s geography, modern Japan played a central role in producing momentous divisions that continue to define the region today. The aftermath of Japanese imperialism and militarism has also left Japan contesting its own national borders with all of its main neighbors aside from the US. This paper discusses how contemporary Japanese artists have staged the boundaries delineating the idea of modern Japan in their works, and how they have responded to the legacy of modern Japan’s complicated self-consciousness in Asia as at once “uniquely insular” and “receptive to outside influences,” at once aloof and invasive, divisive as well as unifying. More specifically, this paper looks at a number of contemporary artworks that feature Okakura Kakuzō (1863-1913) as their main subject. Okakura was a pioneering Japanese art historian who has come to personify the bifurcating vectors of modern Japan as at once centripetally national and centrifugally regional. Hisamatsu Tomoko in her imaginary and “all Japan” group portrait paintings from the mid-2010s represented Okakura as the central patriarch of Japanese national art, for example, while Takayama Akira staged the hip-hop party Public Speech Project (2019), simultaneously unfolding in four different cities in Asia and featuring Okakura as an archetypal pan-Asianist who declared “Asia is one.” These works allow us to discuss the multiple imagined boundaries that mark the cultural contour of Japan today, showing the terms of its openings and closures.
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