Books by Kenji Kajiya
Dissertation by Kenji Kajiya
This dissertation locates Color Field painting in the cultural context of post-war America. Focus... more This dissertation locates Color Field painting in the cultural context of post-war America. Focusing on five painters-Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella-it explores how Color Field painting negotiated modernist art criticism, other artistic movements, and contemporary culture. Although Color Field painters were supported by Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and other
Papers by Kenji Kajiya
American Art in Asia, 2022
Implications Philosophiques, 2017
This essay explores the ways in which the exhibition Real/Life: New British Art was conceived and... more This essay explores the ways in which the exhibition Real/Life: New British Art was conceived and received in Japan, where contemporary British art has been shown since the 1960s. Taking place at five museums in the country between 1998 and 1999, the exhibition aimed to show how British artists in the 1990s struggled with realities, internal and external, but its response was not as satisfactory as was expected. The essay examines the exhibition as a turning point for the transformation of exhibition culture in Japan from nationally themed exhibitions to showcases of contemporary art in the global context. See the illustrated version of this article at: http://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-3/real-life.
Published in World Art 5, no. 1 (spring 2015). This article examines the discussions on tradition... more Published in World Art 5, no. 1 (spring 2015). This article examines the discussions on tradition in art, design, and architecture in the 1950s Japan. It first explores the historical background of the discussions among artists, architects and art historians from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. The article insists that they attached to Japanese traditions various meanings and values including what should be overcome in the process of Westernization, the roots to which Japanese people felt compelled to return in the age of modernity, and the sophisticated sensibility of the Japanese comparable to Western modern aesthetics. The article then investigates the postwar situations. Following European artists’ interest in primitivism, avant-garde artist Okamoto Tarō advocated tradition to make it function as a key factor in the dynamism of the cultural order. Although discussions were not developed and deepened among designers, tradition was actively discussed in a field of architecture. Architects like Tange Kenzō and Shirai Seiichi elevated the tradition debate into the ideological issue, extracting the dichotomy of the Jōmon and the Yayoi and applying them to actual buildings and houses. The tradition debate in architecture meant a new departure in the postwar period, creating important discussions and movements on historical consciousness in the later period, such as the Metabolist movement in the 1960s and the ‘Ma: Space/Time in Japan’ exhibition in 1978. In this sense, the tradition conceived in the 1950s Japan is best regarded as posthistorical.
Paper read at the workshop "M+ Matters: Postwar Abstraction in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan." Y... more Paper read at the workshop "M+ Matters: Postwar Abstraction in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan." You can see it with illustrations at: http://www.mplusmatters.hk/postwar/paper_topic2.php
Reprinted in Japanese Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 of Japanese Popular Cultur... more Reprinted in Japanese Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 of Japanese Popular Culture: Critical Concepts in Asian Studies, edited by Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 128-145. First published in Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale, edited by in Jaqueline Berndt (series Global Manga Studies, vol. 1) (Kyoto: International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University, 2010), pp. 245-261.
opened up, this paper will incorporate the discussion of architecture (information environment) o... more opened up, this paper will incorporate the discussion of architecture (information environment) often mentioned in the recent years within the field of networks, while making references to the activities of Kawamata Tadashi and Yanagi Yukinori, to understand art projects as the questioning towards the architecture of art.
Paper published in Count 10 Before You Say Asia: Asian Art after Postmodernism. Ed. Yasuko Furuic... more Paper published in Count 10 Before You Say Asia: Asian Art after Postmodernism. Ed. Yasuko Furuichi. Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 2009, 208-221.
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Books by Kenji Kajiya
Dissertation by Kenji Kajiya
Papers by Kenji Kajiya