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Art NOW and Women Scholars' Speaker Series present Namiko Kunimoto
Katsura Yuki and the Stakes of Exposure
12 pm | March 11, 2019
University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome!
Refreshments will be served following the lecture in the University Theatre Lobby
WSSS is funded by the President's Office and co-chaired by Dr. Elizabeth Galway & Dr. Louise Barrett.
This presentation examines the work of Katsura Yuki (1913-1991), a Tokyo-based painter and assemblage artist. Katsura enacted political resistance by representing contentious issues such as self-sacrifice in times of war, the United States Castle Bravo nuclear test, and the status of women in Japan. This presentation will focus specifically on her paintings from the 1930s-1960s, as well as her illustrations of the James Baldwin novel, Another Country, that were featured in the Asahi Journal in the 1960s. Katsura’s body of work evaded the overdetermined masculine heroics of abstract expressionism and action art that had taken Japan by storm in the postwar period, forging an innovative mode of expression that was whimsical and strange in its tone, but nonetheless bore a potent political thrust.
Biography
Namiko Kunimoto is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art, with research interests in gender, race, urbanization, photography, visual culture, performance art, transnationalism, and nation formation.
Her essays include “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games” in Asia Pacific Japan Focus, “Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space” forthcoming in Art Journal and “Shiraga Kazuo: The Hero and Concrete Violence” published in Art History. Dr. Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award, and the OSU Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching (2018). She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and is an executive member of Japan Arts and Globalization and Vice-President of the Japanese Art History Forum. Her book, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, was published in February 2017 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Image courtesy of speaker. Katsura Yuki, Gonbe and Crow, 1966.
We wish to thank the Women Scholars' Speaker Series and the President's Office for their collaboration in making this presentation possible.
Can't make it to campus for the lecture? Bring your lunch and check out the livestream at Casa!
Contact:
finearts | finearts@uleth.ca | uleth.ca/fine-arts