Warriors of Art
Warriors of Art

Author: Yumi Yamaguchi

Publisher: Kodansha International

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9784770030313

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Recently the West has been inundated by a steady flow of images from manga, anime, and the video games that are a key part of todays Japanese visual culture. At the same time, Japanese contemporary artists are gaining a higher profile overseas: many Westerners are already familiar with Takashi Murakamis brightly colored, cartoonlike characters, or with Junko Mizunos grotes-cute Lolita-style girls. Perhaps less familiar are the absurd fighting machines of Kenji Yanobe, the many disguises of Tomoko Sawada, or the grotesque fairytale landscapes of Tomoko Konoike. Warriors of Art features the work of forty of the latest and most relevant contemporary Japanese artists, from painters and sculptors, to photographers and performance artists, with lavish full-color spreads of their key works. Author Yumi Yamaguchi offers an insightful introduction to the main themes of each artist, and builds up a fascinating portrait of the society that has given birth to them: a Japan that still bears the scars of atomic destruction, a Japan with a penchant for the cute and the childish, a Japan whose manga and anime industries have come to dominate the world. Warriors of Art takes its title from a phrase used to describe Taro Okamoto (1911-1996), perhaps the first truly influential contemporary artist to emerge in postwar Japan, who fought to bring modern art to a wider audience. Following in Okamotos footsteps, the forty artists featured in this book are a new generation of warriors, attacking our senses with a shocking mix of the cute, the grotesque, the sexy, and the violent, forcing us to sit up and take notice of their vision of Japan.

Contemporary Japanese Sculpture
Contemporary Japanese Sculpture

Author: Janet Koplos

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13:

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A survey of contemporary Japanese sculpture, examining the vigour and originality of three-dimensional art in post-war Japan. The book investigates Gutai, a movement in the 1950s that broke traditions and Mono-ha, the Japanese version of Minimalism prevalent in the 1960s. The rest of the book explores the works of some 90 contemporary sculptors, dividing their work into five categories, such as material, time, image, relationship and place. This text is based on interviews, studio visits and observations of exhibitions.

Consuming Bodies
Consuming Bodies

Author: Fran Lloyd

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9781861891471

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Fran Lloyd focuses on the resurgence in the imaging of sex and consumerism in contemporary Japanese art and the connections they establish with the wider historical, social and political conditions within Japanese culture.

A Primal Spirit
A Primal Spirit

Author: Howard N. Fox

Publisher: Harry N Abrams Incorporated

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 9780810924673

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Koichi Ebizuka ; Toshikatsu Endo ; Chuichi Fujii ; Tadashi Kawamata ; Kazuo Kenmochi, Takamasa Kuniyasu ; Emiko Tokushige ; Shigeo Toya ; Kimio Tsuchiya ; Isamu Wakabayashi.

Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State
Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State

Author: Dōshin Satō

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1606060597

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This is an insightful and intelligent re-thinking of Japanese art history & its Western influences. This broad-ranging and profoundly influential analysis describes how Western art institutions and vocabulary were transplanted to Japan in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870-80s, artists and government administrators in Japan encountered the Western 'system of the arts' for the first time. Under pressure to exhibit and sell its artistic products abroad, Japan's new Meiji government came face-to-face with the need to create European-style art schools and museums - and even to establish Japanese words for art, painting, artist, and sculpture. "Modern Japanese Art" is a full re-conceptualization of the field of Japanese art history, exposing the politics through which the words, categories, and values that structure our understanding of the field came to be while revealing the historicity of Western and non-Western art history.

Hard Bodies
Hard Bodies

Author: Andreas Marks

Publisher: Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781517904173

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Since the Neolithic era, artisans in East Asia have coated bowls, cups, boxes, baskets, and other utilitarian objects with a natural polymer distilled from the sap of the Rhus verniciflua, known as the lacquer tree. Lacquerware was, and still is, prized for its sheen--a lustrous beauty that artists learned to accentuate over the centuries with inlaid gold, silver, mother-of-pearl, and other precious materials. This tradition has undergone challenges over the past thirty years. A small but enterprising circle of lacquer artists has pushed the medium in entirely new and dynamic directions by creating large-scale sculptures--works that are both conceptually innovative and superbly exploitive of lacquer's natural virtues. Featuring thirty works by sixteen artists, this handsome publication details the first-ever exhibition of contemporary Japanese lacquer sculpture in the United States, shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Boom
Boom

Author: Mayumi Nihei

Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub

Published: 2013-03-04

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781482019513

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Japanese POP and CONTEMPORARY Art. For a number of years, the key phrase "Cool Japan" has gained popularrity around the world. The art, fashion, animation, cuisine and architecture that we Japanese have long taken for granted have beenlatched on to as new and exciting by consumers around the world. Arttists introduced here by BOOM are all contemporary art makers currently working in Japan. They vary in technique and age, and essentially have no common theme or genre. However, the one thread that links all of these artists is that, in this ever changing era, they continue to conceive and pursue new and unique methods of expression in their work. In every sense they are "artists living in the NOW". Through BOOM we hope audiences will experience that special "something" that is found in the very DNA of the Japanese people. That je ne sais quoi which has its basis in the traditions of Japanese art and is only emphasized through the expression and craftsmanship of the individual artists presented. These contemporary artists are the true life-breath of their generation. our greatest hope is that this volume may inspire an interest in both these extraordinary artists and their art.

In Pursuit of Universalism
In Pursuit of Universalism

Author: Alicia Volk

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0520259521

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"Volk's impressive study rethinks the East-West binary often reiterated in discussions of Japanese modernism by reinserting local aspects into the universalizing tendencies of modernism itself. The book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on modern Japanese art history by providing an alternative comparative framework for understanding the global development of modernism that decenters Euro-America. Rigorously historical in her critique, Volk destabilizes our understanding of the Japanese experience of modernity through the prism of Yorozu's singular vision of the self, leaving us questioning conventional wisdom and contented to wobble."--Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University "In Volk's affectingly stunning and deeply reflective study of the Japanese artist Yorozu Tetsugorō's work between 1910-1930, we have a profoundly historical reminder of how modernism everywhere struggled to meet the demands of the new with the readymades of received artistic practices. In this study of Yorozu's utopian universalist project, Volk has imaginatively broadened our understanding of the modernist moment and perceptively captured its global program to unify art and life, contemporary culture and history."--Harry Harootunian, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan

Bye Bye Kitty!!!
Bye Bye Kitty!!!

Author: David Elliott

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300166903

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Published to accompany an exhibition held at the Japan Society Gallery, New York, Mar. 18-June 13, 2011.