Keywords: modernism, imperial Japan, total war, fascism, uneven development, avant-garde, proletarian arts, 1930s, museum exhibitions These formal readings explore how the year 1937 marked a pivotal “branch point” for Japanese society, not only in terms of the confluence of various artistic trends but also in terms of the fierce opposition between socialism and fascism that bifurcated potentialities for Japan’s future.
KYORAKU JAPAN BOMBER CAT J. POP SERIES
After introductory remarks on the reassessment of 1930s-era Japanese avant-garde aesthetics, the article provides a series of close readings of significant paintings included in the exhibition, including Murai Masanari’s 1937 Urban, Matsumoto Shunsuke’s 1935 Building, and Uchida Iwao’s 1937 Port. The exhibition’s featured works and curator Asaki Yuka’s direction together emphasized the inseparability of Japanese modernism from the encroaching conditions of world war during the late 1930s, thereby contributing to a growing body of scholarship and series of exhibitions challenging the received oppositions between autonomous modernism, proletarian realism, and wartime propaganda. The author suggests that the exhibition’s unique international scope, rich selection of figurative and abstract modernist works, and emphasis on the year 1937 as a nexus through which the decade’s competing tendencies can be reevaluated readily disclose the constitutive, dialectical relationships between historical difference, total war, and modernist form in imperial Japan and its colonies. This article frames the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama’s 2017 exhibition on Japanese modernism during the simultaneously vibrant and tumultuous 1930s through the lens of Japan’s uneven capitalist development and wartime mobilization. From "Japan and Asia: representations of selfness and otherness", edited by Marco Pellitteri, (Mutual Images, Vol.
The resulting performative act-of demonstrating the new movement in the form of a manifesto as an artistic practice and the elimination of the boundaries between the artwork and the audience-is outstanding. Their tools for achieving this goal in the form of tendencies toward transgressions can be located in the diversity of artistic styles and genres, in the blurring of the boundary between the so-called high and low art, and in the passing from the visible to the invisible. Radical avant-garde groups such as MAVO and Sanka will be introduced as main examples for the movement, which questioned the foundation of modern art and avant-garde in Japan. Beginning first with a general overview of the term avant-garde, this paper next examines roughly Meiji politics as one of the core reasons behind the perception of the early Japanese avant-garde in the 1920s as a simple imitation of the European model.
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