2020
Midori Yamamura
- Assistant Professor
- City University of New York, Kingsborough Community College
![Picture of Midori Yamamura](https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/BEC8A228-8D7A-EA11-80F0-000C296A63B0.jpg)
Abstract
This book examines Japanese contemporary art that negotiates and challenges the globally dominant cultural, economic, and political patterns encouraged by the West. The project frames art through the post-1980s generation that grew up in a materially saturated, urban-centered information society. Of particular interest are the unlikely ways consumerism got politicized by the communist entrepreneur Seiji Tsutsumi, the force behind the “Saison Culture” that introduced the original avant-garde, Russian constructivism, and other Utopian ideas to Japanese audiences together with nyûaka (post-structuralist) literature in the 1980s, which made artists more critically attuned. The book’s ultimate goal is to elucidate how contemporary Japanese artists responded to a series of natural and manmade disasters in the last 30 years, by incorporating homegrown principles into art in order to expand our understandings of the world.