The Art of Conversion in Transwar Japan

This presentation focuses on the long-running careers of three successful but politically and aesthetically diverse artists: Domon Ken (1909-1990), Okamoto Tarō (1911-1996), and Katsura Yuki (1913-1991) and their negotiation of dramatic shifts in the Japanese political landscape between 1930-1970. The arc of these artists’ careers across the prewar, war, and postwar periods upsets popular periodizations in Japan’s art history that assert the postwar as a time of rupture and renewal. My focus is meant to challenge this “postwar paradigm” while elucidating these artist’s negotiation of ethics and plurality during drastically different political eras. All three individuals experienced fascism under the militaristic government and censorship and national “renewal” under the Allied Occupation. How did these successful artists undergo a kind of aesthetic-political conversion and what were the motivations for these shifts? How did issues such as gender and the uneven terrain of the global art market impact each artist, and how did the visual language of their work reveal these contingencies?