Exploring the Global 1960s and Its Impact

Panel Discussion

Friday, May 31, 6:30 PM

During the 1960s, imaginative and innovative artistic practices figuratively and literally explored the concept of “wilderness.” Far away from Tokyo, artists executed radical experimentalism in remote settings, placing the foundation of their work outside of conventional art making. In this discussion, postwar art historian and critic Michio Hayashi (Professor, Sophia University, Tokyo), Radicalism guest curator Reiko Tomii, and Franz Prichard (Assistant Professor, Princeton University) illuminate the vanguard movement of the 1960s and after. Moderated by Japan Society Gallery Director Yukie Kamiya.

Tickets: $15/$12 members, seniors & students

Each ticket includes same day, complimentary admission to the exhibition Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s.

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Michio Hayashi (Professor, Sophia University, Faculty of Liberal Arts)
Art historian/critic based in Tokyo. Ph. D from Columbia University. Publications include Natsuyuki Nakanishi (New York: Fergus McCaffrey Gallery, 2014), Tadaaki Kuwayama (Fellbach: Edition Axel Menges, 2014), “Tracing the Graphic in Postwar Japanese Art,” Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, MoMA, New York: 94-119. Co-edited a volume of Japanese postwar art criticism, From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945-1989 (New York: MoMA, 2012).

Reiko Tomii is a New York-based scholar and curator who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in local and global contexts. Co-director of PoNJA-GenKon, a scholarly listserv for modern and contemporary Japanese art history, she is a prolific writer and innovative thinker whose book Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan received the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award from the Dedalus Foundation.

Franz Prichard’s research and teaching explore the literature, visual media, and critical thought of contemporary Japan as an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He is interested in the provocative forms of exchange among works of criticism, fiction, film and photography that offer vivid perspectives on urban materiality and ecological transformation. Prichard’s book, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan, (Columbia University Press, 2019), examines the rapid transformation of the urban and media ecologies of Japanese literary and visual media of the 1960s and 70s. This interdisciplinary study offers an in-depth account of the critical perspectives of filmmakers, writers, and artists who wrought novel aesthetic vocabularies from the intensive urbanization of the archipelago to question the Cold War remaking of Japan. Mapping the shifting relationships among urban materialities and subjectivities across works of documentary, fiction, and photography, his book illuminates the urban ecologies and the infrastructural aesthetics at the heart of the Cold War in East Asia and worldwide.