The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art

Description

Namiko Kunimoto explores art, visual culture, and politics in postwar Japan from the 1950s to the 1970s, examining how anxiety and confusion surrounding Japan's new democracy manifested in representations of gender and nationhood in modern art. Offering many previously unpublished full-color illustrations, Kunimoto shows how contention over Japan's new democracy was expressed, disavowed, and reimagined through representations of the gendered body.

Namiko Kunimoto is assistant professor of art history at The Ohio State University.

"Kunimoto's manuscript is exactly what the field of Japanese postwar art needs at this time."-Alicia Volk "Eschewing group-centric approaches, The Stakes of Exposure focuses on four artists whose aesthetic politics figure postwar bodies in struggle, vulnerability, desire, and connection. Namiko Kunimoto's analysis navigates between history, historical art literature, and theoretical touchstones through her lucid readings."-William Marotti, UCLA "A significant contribution to Japanese art and scholarship published in English."-CHOICE "Kunimoto's attention to how the gendered body resonated with gendered narratives about society and the nation is an important contribution. Kunimoto offers close readings of the works of Hiroshi Nakamura, Yuki Katsura, Atsuko Tanaka and Kazuo Shiraga to illuminate the responses to shifting ideas about political subjectivity in postwar Japan."-The Japan Times "Kunimoto strategically situates her study between the disciplines of history and art history, opening new lines of inquiry into postwar Japan and, at the same time, challenging many of the underlying assumptions that have informed political and art histories of this period."-Pacific Historical Review "The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, by art historian Namiko Kunimoto, provides monographic essays on four artists active from the 1930s to the 1970s-Yuki Katsura, Hiroshi Nakamura, Atsuko Tanaka and Kazuo Shiraga-and describes a postwar period of national anxiety that produced new conceptions of 'gender and nationhood.'"-Art Asia Pacific