The interval between 1945 and 1952 was an odd one in Japan’s historical past. The nation’s cities and economic system had been devastated by the victorious Allied forces throughout World Battle II. Underneath the paradoxical promise of American liberation, Japanese artists confronted a dilemma that might affect their careers in unsure methods: align with the occupier’s beliefs, or resist to keep up their inventive autonomy.
Japanese artists did each — but fashionable artwork historical past has struggled to deal with a contradictory inventive output that engaged with Japan’s historical past, modernization, and occupation. Alicia Volk’s new tutorial guide, Within the Shadow of Empire: Artwork in Occupied Japan (2025), is a profitable corrective to this lack.
In 5 richly illustrated chapters, Volk provides a deeply researched evaluation of dissonant artwork practices in occupied Japan. Central to the guide’s argument is an exploration of how Japanese artists working throughout media akin to printmaking, portray, and sculpture navigated home and international political pressures and financial upheaval, whereas additionally exercising private company.
Cowl of Chūgoku shiryō (August 1947), that includes element of woodcut by Wang Renfeng, “Impression of Farmers (Nōmin inshō)” (undated)
Impressed by expressive European painters like Kandinsky and Munch, Japanese artist Onchi Kōshirō turned a driving drive behind what would turn out to be popularly often called “creative prints,” which supported a brand new, democratic inventive fame of the nation internationally, first by pictures of peaceable Japanese festivals and later summary varieties. Different artists akin to Suzuki Kenji and Iino Nobuya devoted themselves to what’s often called “people’s prints,” specializing in grief and toil-stricken depictions of native farmers and staff in a extra introspective exploration of postwar Japan.
Cowl of Bi no kuni (March 1948), that includes Onchi Kōshirō, “White Flower: Magnolia (Shiroi hanamagunoria)”
Although the guide can typically be dry attributable to its scholarly nature, its group, readability, and dialogue with Japan’s political and social histories make for extremely compelling studying. Volk establishes how Japanese monuments of warfare and peace had been something however easy artifacts of the interval, garnering divisive attitudes from the general public. For example, Kikuchi Kazuo’s “Peace Group (Heiwa gunzō)” (1950), a trio of three nude feminine figures representing love, will, and intelligence commissioned for the town of Tokyo, loved relative success. However the nude male sculpture “Voices of the Sea (Wadatsumi no koe)” (1950) by Hongō Shin, commemorating student-soldiers killed within the warfare, was extremely controversial; the work was admired as a peace image but additionally criticized by artwork establishments and the general public for its glamorization of Japan’s personal aggressive historical past of warfare.
Within the Shadow of Empire’s key takeaway is grand and clear: Attitudes towards the research of Japanese artwork from the occupied interval want to alter. Fairly than being relegated to a lesser interval of artwork historical past, these works should be foregrounded as vital objects of political negotiation and cultural dialog in fashionable East Asia.
Akamatsu Toshiko and Maruki Iri, “Ghosts (Yūrei)” (1950), first portray within the sequence Atomic Bomb Photos (1950), mounted as eight-panel folding display, ink on paper
Migishi Setsuko, “Still Life (Seibutsu)” (1948), oil on canvas
Hongō Shin, “Voices of the Sea (Wadatsumi no koe)” (1950), bronze, later solid
In The Shadow of Empire: Artwork in Occupied Japan, written by Alicia Volk and printed by the College of Chicago Press, is accessible for buy on-line and in bookstores.
