Modern Art Asia Issue 1: Japan, Modern Art, and Tradition

Our inaugural issue focuses on East Asia, presenting cutting-edge international research and reviews. Exhibitions in New York, London, Seoul, and Taipei present snapshots of Asian art as displayed in museums and galleries across the globe, while reviews and conference reports emphasize the wealth of scholarship currently being produced on Chinese modern and contemporary art.

At the core of this first issue of Modern Art Asia are three articles engaging issues in Japanese art. Gwyn Helverson presents a provocative and thoroughly researched account of six Neo-Nihonga painters, interrogating their work in terms of gender and violence and locating it within a social and political nexus. Marci Kwon offers a new perspective on the work of €˜art star€ Takashi Murakami, best known for his commercial collaborations with Louis Vuitton, by reading the engagement with consumerism in his art as a deliberate appropriation rather than a compromise. Yayoi Shionoiri discusses Japanese post-war photographer Hosoe Eikoh€s portraits of Nobel-nominee, writer and performer Mishima Yukio, whose infamous public suicide by seppuku retrospectively imbues this series of images with a special power to remind us of the ephemerality of the photographic moment.

With the conclusion of Asian Art in London, we are pleased to present the first issue of Modern Art Asia with the goal of increasing the international dialogue about Asian art, and kindling greater scholarly and nonspecialist interest in these works that are now global as much as regional.