Making a Transnational Design History in East Asia: Yen Shuilong’s Craft-Design Movement

Yen Shuilong (1903-97) was born in Taiwan within the ‘Japanese Empire’ but his live is dominated by what we would now call transnational activities. During the fifteen years since his death, there have been a number of retrospective exhibitions on him, and these have served to anchor his status in Taiwanese history of art and design. From last year through to this year the Taipei Fine Arts Museum organised an exhibition ‘The Public Spirit, Beauty in the Making： Shui-Long Yen’. (Fig. 2) On the other hand in Japan, even though Yen was Japanese until 1945, he hasn’t been well recognized, and it appears as though he may have been intentionally forgotten with the history of Japanese colonization

‘Transnational Trajectories and Cold War Design under the Russel Wright Project in Asia: the Case of Ken and Michiko Uyemura ’

Fellows Lectures at the Smithsonian American Art Museu

‘Modernity and Everydayness: Design under Japan’s Empire’

This paper was presented at the ‘1920-45 Inter-Asia design assimilation: Translations, Differentiations and Transmission’ conference which I jointly organised at the Design Museum, London

‘Yanagi Sōetsu and Korean crafts within the Mingei movement’

This article provides a postcolonial critique on Yanagi Sōetsu' involvement in colonial Korea and its implications in the Mingei movement

Minor Transnational Inter-Subjectivity in the People's Art of Kitagawa Tamiji

The Japanese painter Kitagawa Tamiji’s (1894–1989) unique transnational idea of people’s art originated in New York, where he was a migrant worker and a student at the Art Students League (1916–20), developed gradually over the decades of his career in the midst of the well-known muralist art movement in post-revolutionary Mexico (1921–36), and matured during the remainder of Kitagawa’s long life in Seto, Japan. Kitagawa’s concept of people’s art represents the expression of the people’s subjective power and is grounded in local grass-roots activities. In his later years, in the 1970s, Kitagawa expressed his adherence to people’s art as the “philosophy of a grasshopper” (batta no tetsugaku), a phrase that he repeated as a sort of personal motto. For Kitagawa, the grasshopper or locust (batta) served as an alter ego. In pre-Columbian Mexico, the grasshopper (chapulin in Nahuatl) was associated with a mythical tribal totem, which explains the name of the prominent site Chapultepec Hill (Hill of Grasshopper) in Mexico City, historically an important locus of political power. Although individual grasshoppers are small, Kitazawa explained, they migrate, and “swarms of grasshoppers damage crops in the fields, and can cause famine.” He likened art to a grasshopper because art is not only pleasurable and beautiful, but also contains the hidden power to become a formidable enemy. Kitagawa’s idea of people’s art appears throughout his numerous essays and is further articulated in the recollections of his avid supporter, the art critic, collector, and collaborator for children’s art education, Kubo Sadajirō (1909-96). This article investigates how Kitagawa’s cross-cultural experiences enriched his idea of people’s art and added complexity to his artistic expression after he returned to Japan in 1936. Focusing primarily on Kitagawa’s work following his departure from Mexico, I wish to highlight connections to Kitagawa’s time in Mexico in order to provide a post-colonial perspective on transnational art by borrowing the concept “minor transnationalism” from the comparative literature scholars Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, as introduced in their Minor Transnationalism (2005). This concept of a “minor transnationalism” proposes a transnational perspective through horizontal studies of relationships among minor-peripheral cultures rather than the normative vertical studies of relations between a major-center and minor-cultures on its periphery. Lionnet and Shih argue that their approach allows one to look at cultures being “produced and performed without any necessary mediation with the center,” giving insight into “less scripted and more scattered” phenomena that occur across “different and multiple spatialities and temporalities.” Thus, dialogues between multiple minor spaces allow the periphery to develop self-awareness, and self-critique. Lionnet and Shih note a level of commensurability and effectiveness in revolutionary philosopher Franz Fanon’s attempt to carry his argument well beyond the center’s self-critique. Fanon reworked the Hegelian or Sartrean critique of alienation into a context for the minor culture’s struggle for national and cultural autonomy and worldwide racial equality. The term “minor’” is not used in a pejorative sense here, but positively to provide scholars the freedom to look at the fluid production of art beyond the normative study frame of Western art verses non-Western art. This essay treats Mexico and Japan as “minor” and non-Western, in terms of the art they produce, as nations that searched for modernity and an identity under the overwhelming power of Western art. Kitagawa’s art provides an interesting case of a minor transnationalism operating between Mexico and Japan. By focusing on Kitagawa’s minor transnational connections, this essay also questions the way we look at modernities of non-Western art, which are normally studied as phenomena of reception and appropriation of Western art within a fixed framework of center-periphery cultural relations

Contradictions in policy and implementation of adult education and training : unifying the system or accommodating diversity?

Bibliography: leaves 97-102.This study attempts to examine and answer the research question: "What is the feasibility of the integration of education and training through promotion of the GETC as envisaged within the NQF discourse?" Focusing on problematic educational policy implementation in South Africa, the study also attempts to examine causes for the disparity between intended policies and implemented policies

‘American Occupation and Cold War Japanism: Containment and Mixed Marriage in Design and Film’

The American Occupation of Japan and the subsequent alliance between the two countries during the Cold War brought a radical change in the image of Japan. This lecture examines the transition of Japan’s prewar art craft to postwar modern craft design in relation to American taste constructed through interventions by the GHQ officers and Russel Wright. The focus of the paper is the successful mixed marriage of Japanese and American design – ‘Asian Modern’

Russel Wright's Asian Project and Japanese Post-War Design

American designer Russel Wright is well known in the western design context for his promotion of ‘American Modern’ design and the Good Design movement during the 1930s-50s. However his role in promoting the idea of ‘Asian modern’ to Asian countries in the post-war period has been little known and studied. He facilitated American aid for Asian countries to develop their handcrafts cottage industry producing craft based modern design products for the US market. This conference paper focused on Wright’s project in Japan as part of the foreign aid programme organised by the American government International Cooperation Administration (ICA) in the late 1950s. This paper shed light, for the first time, on the resources in Asian languages at the Russel Wright Archive at Syracuse University, which was given a wider context through archival and interview data gathered in Japan. Secondly, this paper investigated Wright’s project as part of Cold War design policies. Much has been written on American art and the role it played as part of the American anti-communist containment policy, however, there is little research on the relation between design and the Cold War in Asian contexts

‘Yanagi Sōetsu et l’artisanat traditionnel japonais’

This article discusses Yanagi Soetsu and the Mingeimovement during the 1920s-40s. This article was commissioned after the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition at the V&A in 2005 to which I was a major contributor