Wednesdays@2: Art and Imperialism in Postwar Japan
April 16, 2025
2:00–3:00 PM
Location: CMA
This presentation by Namiko Kunimoto focuses on the long-running careers of some politically and aesthetically diverse artists including Okamoto Tarō (1911-1996). The arc of Okamoto and other artists careers across the prewar, war, and postwar periods upsets popular periodization in art history that assert the postwar as a time of rupture and renewal. How did the Imperial period relate to art in the 1970s? How does a reading of their work reveal continuities before and after the war, and what are the political stakes of these continuities?
We are pleased to present this program in conjunction with the exhibition Wild Earth: JB Blunk and Toshiko Takaezu, on view through August 3.
Tickets are free for members, $10 for nonmembers.
Her essays include “Olympic Labor and Displacement: Babel and Its Towers” in Review of Japanese Art and Culture, (2023), “Art in Transwar Japan” ThirdText (2022), Situating “Becoming a Statue of a Japanese ‘Comfort Woman:’ Shimada Yoshiko, Bourgeois Liberalism and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism” Verge: Studies in Global Asia, (2022) “Tsujimura Kazuko and the Body Object” in Asia Pacific Japan Focus (2021), and “Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space” in Art Journal (2019). Dr. Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), Ishibashi Foundation Fellowship (2021), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award (2017), and the Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award (2019). Her book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, was published by the University of Minnesota Press and she is currently working on her next book, Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Art forthcoming in 2026 from the University of California Press.
We are pleased to present this program in conjunction with the exhibition Wild Earth: JB Blunk and Toshiko Takaezu, on view through August 3.
Tickets are free for members, $10 for nonmembers.
About Namiko Kunimoto
Namiko Kunimoto is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art, with research interests in diasporic art, gender, race, urbanization, photography, visual culture, performance art, transnationalism, and nation formation. She is the Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University and Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art.Her essays include “Olympic Labor and Displacement: Babel and Its Towers” in Review of Japanese Art and Culture, (2023), “Art in Transwar Japan” ThirdText (2022), Situating “Becoming a Statue of a Japanese ‘Comfort Woman:’ Shimada Yoshiko, Bourgeois Liberalism and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism” Verge: Studies in Global Asia, (2022) “Tsujimura Kazuko and the Body Object” in Asia Pacific Japan Focus (2021), and “Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space” in Art Journal (2019). Dr. Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), Ishibashi Foundation Fellowship (2021), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award (2017), and the Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award (2019). Her book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, was published by the University of Minnesota Press and she is currently working on her next book, Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Art forthcoming in 2026 from the University of California Press.
