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Team

Director: Kajiya Kenji (Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo)

Kenji Kajiya is an art historian who specializes in 20th-century American and Japanese art. He holds his PhD in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He served as a fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and an associate professor at Hiroshima City University and Kyoto City University of Arts before he joined the current university in 2016. With scholars and curators he launched the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art and became its Director in 2006. He has begun a book project on Color Field painting in the cultural context of America. He is a co-editor of From the Postwar to the Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945-1989: Primary Documents, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2012, and 12-volume Selected Art Writings of Nakahara Yūsuke, which are being published by Gendai kikakushitsu and BankART publishing from 2011 to be completed soon.

Vice Director: Ikegami Hiroko (Professor, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University)

Hiroko Ikegami is an art historian who specializes in post-1945 American art and the globalization of the art world. As undergraduate exchange student, she studied at the University of Sussex, where she discovered her passion for post-1945 American art. After completing her M.A. degree at Osaka University, she earned her Ph.D. at Yale University in 2007. Conducting a series of interviews for dissertation and the use of oral history program at the Archives of American Art led her to conceive an oral history project of Japanese art with Kenji Kajiya. In 2010, she published The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art from The MIT Press. In 2012, she co-organized the first retrospective exhibition of Ushio Shinohara in the United States and in 2015 served as a consulting curator for the Japanese section of “International Pop exhibition at Walker Art Center. She teaches as professor in the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at Kobe University.

Makiguchi Chinatsu (Curator, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto)

Chinatsu Makiguchi is a curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, specializing in photography and contemporary art since 2006. She received M.A. degree in art history from Osaka University. In Kyoto she worked for exhibitions and projects including “Reading Cinema, Finding Words: Art after Marcel Broodthaers”(2013/2014), “Curatorial Studies 10: Re-reading Henry F. Talbot’s Pencil of Nature” (2016), and “Order & Reorder: Curate Your Own Exhibition from the Collection” (2016), “Curatorial Studies 12: The 100th Anniversary of Duchamp's Fountain”(2017–18), “Dress Code: Are You Playing Fashion?”(2019), etc.

Members:

Adachi Gen (Independent Scholar and Art Historian)

Adachi Gen is an art historian who has written on modern Japanese avant-garde art and visual studies. He is currently an associate professor at Nishogakusha University.

Awata Daisuke (Art Critic)

Born in 1977, Awata Daisuke won the prize of 13th BT Award of Art Criticism by his essay “Events and the Construction of Layers by Enokura Kōji.” His essays include “Symptoms in Painting − Intervention Ratio B (to the Space),” “Enokura Kōji and Books,” “Grounds and Patterns in SPACE TOTSUKA ’70,” and is the member of editorial board of 12-volume Selected Art Writings of Nakahara Yūsuke (Gendai Kikakushitsu; BankART Publishing, 2011−).

Hosoya Shūhei (Art and Media Researcher)

Born in 1983, Hosoya Shūhei is a scholar on art and media and videographer. After he studied symbolic iconography and book and film editing at university, Hosoya is engaged in art documentation through interviews, researches and records on artists' practices. His main research field is the art and politics and media in the 1960s, on which he has made videos and texts as well as organized symposia and edited books. After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Hosoya continues his thinking and practice on art and documentation. His co-authored works Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Again (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2017), Japanese Terror: Era of Bombs 60s–70s (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2017), Peninsula Theory (Kyobunsha, 2018). He is currently an adjunct lecturer at Takasaki City University of Economics.

Imura Yasuko (Head of Library and Information Services, The National Art Center, Tokyo)

Yasuko Imura is an art historian specializing in post-1945 Japanese art, and Interdisciplinary Art and Design Studies. She served as an Associate professor, Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences before joining her current museum in 2022. She received her Ph.D. from the Kyoto City University of Arts in 2013; the title of her doctoral thesis is Art criticism in the 1960s: From the Perspective of Yoshiaki Tōno. She is a co-editor of The Era of the Virtual Image: An Anthology of Art Criticism of Yoshiaki Tōno (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2013) and the author of “From the Exhibition Shikisai to Kūkan (“Color and Space”) to the Osaka Expo – the Intersection of ‘60s Art and Architecture,” in Gendai Shiso, vol. 48 no. 3, 2020, “The Genealogy of Intermedia in Contemporary Japanese Art of the 1960s,” in Bijutsu Forum 21, no. 45, 2022, etc.

Kaburaki Azusa (Librarian and Archivist)

Kaburaki Azusa is a librarian and archivist at Museum of Modern Art, Saitama. She received her master’s degree in Library and information science at the Graduate School of Keio University. Her recent work includes 12-volume Selected Art Writings of Nakahara Yūsuke (Gendai Kikakushitsu; BankART Publishing, 2011–), “AICA Japan Records, 1954–2015: arrangement proposal, scope and contents description.” AICA Japan Newsletter, no. 20, 2019, and Decode: Events and Materials: The Work of Art in the Age of Post-Industrial Society (Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, 2019).

Kikukawa Aki (Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama)

Kikukawa Aki researches 20th-century sculptures and its acceptance in Japan. She received her M.A. degree from Kyoto City University of Arts. Her publications includes “A Study on the Constructive Sculptures Produced by Masakazu Horiuchi in the 1950s : On the Global Popularization of Geometric Abstraction” (Machikaneyama Ronso, Osaka University, 2017), “A Study on Masakazu Horiuchi in World War II Based on a Correspondence with Shindo Tsuji” (BULLETIN, Kyoto City University of Arts, 2018), “French Institute of Kansai and Artists in Kyoto : Cultural Exchange during World War Ⅱ” (BULLETIN, Kyoto City University of Arts, 2019).

Miyata Yūka

Miyata Yūka spent her childhood in Hokkaido and became familiar with the local community and oral literature. She learned about the interesting aspects of "speaking" and the difficulty of "listening" from visiting artisans and historic site managers to hear about their own history for "area studies" class in high school in Saitama. In parallel with the preservation and restoration of the documentation of the former “Naiqua Gallery”, of which her father was the owner and organizer, she interviewed the people involved in the gallery and curated the exhibition "Naiqua Gallery: Japanese Avant-Garde in 1960s" (Kyoto University of Art and Design) in 2000, while she was a student at the university. Since she could not record the valuable interview and shared with the society, at that time, she participated in this archive from 2009. After graduated in 2000, she has been practiced in research and disclosure of information of collections and exhibition in several museums.

Nakajima Izumi (Associate professor, Osaka University)

Nakajima Izumi is an art historian who specialize in feminism, Japanese art history and contemporary art. After completing her M.A. degree at University of Leeds, she earned her Ph.D. at Hitotsubashi University in 2013. She has been interested in art and feminism in modern and contemporary Japan and conducted interviews of women artists. Her recent publication includes Anti-action: Post-War Japanese Art and Women Artists (Brücke, 2019) and “Dream for Solidarity: Palestinian Art JAALA and Haryū Ichirō in the 1970s and 1980s” in Past Disquiet: Artists International Solidarity and Museums-in-Exile, (University of Chicago Press, 2018). She currently teaches at Osaka University as associate professor.

Nonaka Yumiko (Curator/ Registrar, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)

Nonaka Yumiko is an assistant curator and registrar at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa since 2014. She received her master’s degree in art history at the Graduate School of Nagoya University. Her main research is about post-1945 German art. She is currently interested in the transition of artistic expressions and its reception from the end of World War II until today. She curated “Sea Lane – Connecting to the Islands” (2022), “SATOSHI MURAKAMI Living Migration” (2020), “Where We Now Stand—In Order to Map the Future” (2019), “Aperto10 YOKOYAMA Nami Memories of Love and Me” (2019), “Aperto09 NISHIMURA Yu paragraph” (2018), “TARO IZUMI A Child Suddenly” (2017).

Tsuji Yasutaka (Assistant Professor, The University of Tsukuba)

Yasutaka Tsuji specializes in the history of art and architecture after WWII. In 2014–2015, he was Visiting Scholar in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, with a fellowship of the Agency for Cultural Affairs. His publications include "A Study on the Exhibition "From Space to Environment" (1966)," in Journal of Architecture and Planning, Architectural Institute of Japan, vol. 79, no. 704, October 2014 and "Display as Method: The Installation Design of the Early National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo" in Cultural Resources Studies, vol. 16, June 2018. As a contributor, "Outdated Pavilions: Learning from Montreal at the Osaka Expo" in Invisible Architecture: Italian and Japanese Movements in the 1960s, Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2017 and "Blurred Monument: Technology and Representations of Kasumigaseki Building in the Skyscraper" in Global History of Architecture: 15 Lectures, Tokyo: Shokokusha Publishing, 2019.

Yamamine Junya (Curator /CEO, NYAW Inc.)

After working as a curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and Contemporary Art Centre, Art Tower Mito, he established and directed ANB Tokyo. He later established NYAW Inc. to plan and consult on culture and art-related projects. Major exhibitions include ‘Hello World: For the Post-Human Age’ and ' Resistance of Fog: Fujiko Nakaya' (Art Tower Mito) and 'The world began without the human race and it will end without it.' (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts). Also, Meet Your Art Festival "NEW SOIL", an art festival organized by avex; Music Loves Art in Summer Sonic 2022, a joint project of the Agency for Cultural Affairs and Summer Sonic; and Moriyama In addition to the KOBE Re:Public Art Project, which he co-curated with Mirai Moriyama, he also supervises art programmes and special features for magazines and television. he has also written, lectured and served on numerous juries, and was a 2015–2016 fellow of the program of MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - Japan).

Yamashita Kōhei (Art Historian)

Yamashita Kōhei receieved his PhD in Kyoto City University of Art in 2016. He is an art historian who specializes in Japanese art history after WWⅡ. In his study on Japanese art history after WWⅡ, he examines the structure and intension of art world itself in Japan by analyzing art exhibitions and their discourses. In 2017, He published “International Art Exhibition, Japan” and Art History after World WarⅡ: Interpreting Its Changes and the Institution of “Art” from SOGENSHA. His publications includes “Exploring the Japan Ushimado International Art Festival: Transformation of Open-Air Art Exhibitions and the Institution of “Art” in the 1980s Japan” (BIGAKU (Aesthetics), Vol.68, No.1, 2017.) and “Changes of Large-Scale Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Institutionalizing “Art” in Japan after WWⅡ: A Study of “International Contemporaneity” in the 1960s” (BULLETIN, Vol.60, Faculty of Fine Arts, Kyoto City University of Arts, 2016.) He is currently an adjunct lecturer at Kyoto City University of Art and other universities.

Members Abroad:

Nakamori Yasufumi (Tate Modern, Senior Curator of International Art)

Nakamori Yasufumi developed an interest in postwar Japanese art and architecture while working in Tokyo as a US attorney from 1999 to 2002. Between 2008 and 2016, he served as a curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and taught modern and contemporary East Asian art and post-1945 Japanese art and architecture at Rice University and Hunter College, CUNY. In his Ph.D. dissertation (Cornell, 2011), he examined selected collaborations between architects, artists, and photographers, in particular the unbuilt projects led by Kenzō Tange, Arata Isozaki and others Metabolists from 1953 to 1970 with a focus on their pursuits for building a modern city in postwar Japan, considering the resurgence of the notion of the tradition known as the tradition debate. Part of his dissertation was published, titled Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston with Yale University Press, 2010), which received a 2011 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award from the College Art Association. His exhibitions and publications on post-1945 Japanese art include For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston with Yale University Press, 2015) and Naoya Hatakeyma: Excavating the Future City (Minneapolis Institute of Art with Aperture Foundation, 2018). Most recently, he contributed an essay to the book Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco with the University of California Press, 2019)

Tezuka Miwako (Associate Director, ARAKAWA+GINS Reversible Destiny Foundation; Co-director, PONJA-GenKon)

Tezuka Miwako received BA from New York University, and worked at art galleries in SoHo where she encountered exciting works by contemporary Asian artists. In the mid-1990s when there was no such field as contemporary Asian art, she decided to continue her study at Columbia University’s graduate program in art history. With a particular interest in cross-disciplinary collaborative activities by Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) during the 1950s, Tezuka conducted a series of interviews with former members of the group as well as with artists and art critics who were active at the time. In 2005 she received PhD from Columbia University for her research on Jikken Kobo.
From 2005 to 2012, she worked as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Asia Society Museum in New York, working with a broader perspective on Asian contemporary art. As the museum began collecting contemporary Asian art in 2007, Tezuka conducted a series of interviews with artists whose works were acquired into the museum collection. From 2012 to 2015, Tezuka led the Japan Society Gallery in New York as the first Japanese national to be appointed its Director in the organization’s 100-year-long history. During her three-year tenure, she brought the gallery to a new direction envisioning the merging of the tradition and the contemporary through a number of exhibitions and new initiatives including the Summer Artist Residency Program and annual benefit auctions.
In 2015 Tezuka became Consulting Curator of the Reversible Destiny Foundation (RDF), a progressive art foundation established by Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins in New York. Since 2020 she has been its Associate Director. Concurrently, she works with Dr. Tomii Reiko to enhance programs of the online network PoNJA-GenKon, which she co-founded with Tomii in 2003.
Tezuka has curated numerous exhibitions and worked with both emerging and established artists from Asia and beyond, including: Chen Chieh-jen, U-Ram Choe, Robert Indiana, Maya Lin, Ikeda Manabu, Mori Mariko, Nara Yoshitomo, teamLab, Tenmyouya Hisashi, Wang Gong Xin, Yang Fudong. Her most recent curatorial projects include the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022 (as Associate Curator; Feb. 18–May 8, 2022), and the exhibition A Spirit of Gift, A Place of Sharing: Yusuke Asai, Kimsooja, Pinaree Sanpitak at the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts (as Guest Curator; May 29–Nov. 20, 2022).

Tomii Reiko (Art Historian; Independent Scholar; PONJA-GenKon co-founder)

Reiko Tomii is an independent art historian and curator based in New York who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in global and local contexts. She was first exposed to oral history while studying art history at Osaka University, where her department regularly hosted conversations with such living artists as Gutai’s Motonaga Sadamasa and Shiraga Kazuo. Oral history has since become a vital part of her research and publications, including her doctoral dissertation on George Ricky at the University of Texas at Austin (completed 1988) and her research for the first U.S. retrospective of Kusama Yayoi at the now-defunct Center for International Contemporary Arts (CICA) in New York (1989). Together with her rigorous historical investigation, her ongoing engagement with oral history is demonstrated by, among numerous others, her recent works on Hikosaka Naoyoshi (Professor Eiko Wakayama Memorial Volume, 2006), Akasegawa Genpei (Hyperart Thomason, 2010), Xu Bing (Albion Editions, 2011), and Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016). In 2019, for Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s, an exhibition at Japan Society in New York, she incorporated her oral history findings into didactics for the general audience. After she co-founded PoNJA-GenKon (Post-1945 Japanese Art Discussion Group / Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai), a listserv group of specialists interested in contemporary Japanese art (www.ponja-genkon.net), in 2003, she has integrated oral history as part of scholarly conferences she co-organized under the group’s auspice with Yale University (2005), Getty Research Institute (2007), New York University (2014), and University of Chicago (2017, 19). She received the 2020 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese government for “international cultural exchange” (postwar Japanese art history).

Yoshimoto Midori (Professor, Art Department, New Jersey City University)

Yoshimoto Midori is professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University. After receiving her B.A. from Osaka University, she moved to the United States on a Rotary Foundation scholarship. In 2005, she published her Ph.D. dissertation, completed at Rutgers University, as Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. She has contributed various essays to Japanese exhibition catalogs such as, Japanese Women Artists in Avant-garde Movements, 1950-1975 (Tochigi Prefectural Art Museum, 2005), Dissonances (Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, 2008), Ay-O: Over the Rainbow Once More (Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2012). Her English publications include: “1962-1964” in Yoko Ono One Woman Show (MoMA, 2015); “Fluxus Nexus: Fluxus in New York and Japan” (post.at.moma.org, 2013); “Limitless World: Gutai’s Reinvention in Environment Art and Intermedia” (Gutai: Splendid Playground, Guggenheim Museum, 2013); “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyō and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan” (CAA Art Journal, fall 2008); a special issue, “Women and Fluxus” of the Women and Performance journal (guest-editor, Nov. 2009), and a special issue, “Expo ’70 and Japanese Art” of the Josai Review of Japanese Society and Culture (guest-editor, 2012). In 2021, her co-curated exhibition, Viva Video!: The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota toured three museums in Japan and received the Ringa Art Prize. Her co-edited book, Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology was also published by Bloomsbury.

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