Twenty-Fifth Annual Michele Berton Memorial Lecture on Japanese Art: Coming of Age, Finally? The Development of i-Culture in Japanese Art of the Last Twenty-Five Years

Sunday, December 2, 2012
3:30 p.m.

Dorothy Collins Brown Auditorium
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90036

The Michele Berton Memorial Lectures on Japanese Art were conceived to advance research on Japanese art and to communicate these findings to a broad audience. The annual lectures deal with the entire range of Japanese art from the earliest times to the contemporary scene and embrace all media. The lectureship was established in 1988 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the family of Michele Berton, who was for many years a docent at the museum. A one-time resident of and frequent visitor to Japan, Michele Berton felt a special affinity for that country and her Japanese friends and had a deep understanding of Japanese culture.


Coming of Age, Finally?
The Development of i-Culture in Japanese Art of the Last Twenty-Five Years
Miwako Tezuka, PhD

After the decade of Japan's bubble economy of the 1980s came what some call the decadent decade of the 1990s, during which many Japanese felt as though there was no future. During this decade and the following 2000s artist Takashi Murakami, through his work and a series of curatorial endeavors, portrayed contemporary Japan as a child that never grows up, and its art, consequently, as something suffused with subcultures of manga and anime. In retrospect, the rise and fall of the Japanese economy in the last twenty-five years is a phenomenon of mythological scale. How did this tectonic shift in the economy affect artistic production in Japan? Do the sociopolitical developments and changes in recent years finally show a sign of artistic "coming of age," previously thought to have been perpetually suspended? This lecture begins by tracing the footsteps of major Japanese artists such as Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, and Mariko Mori, who came to blossom in the international art world from the 1990s to the 2000s, and continues by looking toward the future envisioned by the next generation of artists and artist collectives including Chim^Pom, Kengo Kito, Paramodel, Koki Tanaka, and Three.


Speaker

Miwako Tezuka, PhD

Miwako Tezuka is the Director of Japan Society Gallery in New York. Previously, she was Associate Curator at Asia Society in New York. She received her PhD in contemporary Japanese art from Columbia University in 2005. In 2003 Tezuka cofounded PoNJA-GenKon (post-1945 Japanese Art Discussion Group), a global online network of over 150 specialists and students working in the field of contemporary Japanese art. At Asia Society Tezuka has co-curated Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody's Fool (2010) and curated U-Ram Choe: In Focus (2011) and Mariko Mori: Kumano (2010), among many others. For the upcoming 2013 season at Japan Society, she reunites with Mariko Mori to undertake a major solo exhibition featuring her works of the recent years.


RSVP by Monday, November 26
(323) 857-6565
Seating is limited

For more information, please visit here