Art History Week 9- Between Memory and Imagination
The focus of this week’s seminar was post-WW2 anime and manga, and how it has been influenced by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Murakami’s “Little Boy” text argues that much of Japan’s anime and manga output has been a sort of “working through” of the nuclear fallout and the destruction and suffering it…
Art History- Week 4- Hokusai Exhibition at the British Museum and Collection Practice
The British Museum curated an exhibition titled Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything from 30 September 2021 – 30 January 2022, sponsored by The Asahi Shimbun. The exhibition featured over a hundred drawings by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), which were produced towards the end of his life for an illustrated encyclopedia that was never published.…
Art History- Week 7- Great Kanto Earthquake: Art and Disasters
Gennifer Weisenfeld’s Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 discusses the history of disaster-based artwork in Japan and finds examples of images of human suffering that date back to the 12th century. The country sits on or near the boundary of four tectonic plates (Pacific, North American, Eurasian and…
Art History- Week 6- Textiles
The focus of this week’s Art History presentation and seminar was textiles, and the two readings that informed our discussion were Catherine Dormor’s “Textile as Viscous Substance” and Julia Sapin’s “Naturalism Fusing Past and Present: the Reconfiguration of the Kyoto School”. Dormor’s text is theoretical and offers a lens through which to think about textiles…
Art History- Reading Week- British Museum
The Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries are currently found on the 5th floor of the British Museum. They are far from the museum’s main atrium on the Ground Floor, and the secluded location makes me think that they are visited by people who actively seek them, and not so much by people who discover them by…
Art History Week 3- Which Japan?
Yoshiaki Shimizu’s article ‘Japan in American Museums: But Which Japan?’ constitutes an interesting point of reference for a discussion on the representation of Japanese art in America and the West in general. The article cogently outlines the impact politics and international relations have on the accumulation of art by curators. For example, after World War…
Art History Week 2- Taiwan
Women of the Tsuo Tribe is a black-and-white photograph taken by Otani Bunichi between May 10 and May 15 1915, which was notably during the period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule (1895-1945), and published by Taiwan shashinkai (which loosely translates as Taiwan Photographic Society). A link to the image can be found here: https://ldr.lafayette.edu/concern/images/kk91fm19h…
Researching Japan (Spring Week 10)- Blogging
This week we had a seminar led by President of the British Association of Japanese Studies, Dr Christopher Hood, who is also Reader in Japanese Studies at Cardiff University. The main focus of the seminar was the topic of blogging- Dr Hood has a prolific online presence across multiple social media platforms, which he successfully…
Researching Japan (Spring Week 9)- Art History
This week Dr Nicole Rousmaniere held our weekly Researching Japan seminar, on the topic of kazari. The word kazari loosely translates into English as decoration and one often sees the related term kazarimono too, which roughly means decorative object. In Dr Rousmaniere’s presentation we learned about a range of decorative items from pre-modern Japanese history,…
Researching Japan (Spring Week 8)- Research Skills/ History
This week Sherzod Muminov ran our weekly seminar, which gave us the opportunity to share with each other our experiences of conducting research for our MA dissertations. Sherzod’s research in both the Russian and Japanese languages has taken him to national archives in Moscow and Tokyo, and he gave us an insight into his work…
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