Sponsor
Asian Pacific Studies Institute (APSI)
Co-Sponsor(s)
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan
Thursday, February 12,
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Speaker(s): Alicia Volk (Japanese Art, University of Maryland)
**the talk will take place in Room A266**
Drawn from Volk's recently published In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan, this talk unearths an immensely creative yet almost entirely overlooked body of Japanese art.
Introducing charismatic but little-known paintings, prints, and sculpture made during the US occupation (1945-1952), it will show how the forgotten art of a country in the shadows of American empire both accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II.
Volk will reveal the transnational dimensions of early postwar Japanese artistic practices and show how they hold the potential for rethinking our histories of Japanese and global postwar art alike.
About the speaker:
Alicia Volk is a Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Maryland. She is the author of "Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement" (2005) and curator of the exhibition of the same name. Her 2010 book, "In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art" received the Phillips Book Prize. "In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan" (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is her latest book.
Volk has been a Japan Foundation-Ishibashi Foundation Fellow, a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the School of African and Asian Studies of the University of London, a Fulbright Research Fellow at Waseda University, and most recently, a Beineke Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.
Drawn from Volk's recently published In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan, this talk unearths an immensely creative yet almost entirely overlooked body of Japanese art.
Introducing charismatic but little-known paintings, prints, and sculpture made during the US occupation (1945-1952), it will show how the forgotten art of a country in the shadows of American empire both accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II.
Volk will reveal the transnational dimensions of early postwar Japanese artistic practices and show how they hold the potential for rethinking our histories of Japanese and global postwar art alike.
About the speaker:
Alicia Volk is a Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Maryland. She is the author of "Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement" (2005) and curator of the exhibition of the same name. Her 2010 book, "In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art" received the Phillips Book Prize. "In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan" (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is her latest book.
Volk has been a Japan Foundation-Ishibashi Foundation Fellow, a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the School of African and Asian Studies of the University of London, a Fulbright Research Fellow at Waseda University, and most recently, a Beineke Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.
