Noriko Murai – Composing in Groups

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Individual Expressions and Collective Output in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Art groups and cultural circles abound in the history of modern art in Japan: Pan-no-kai (The Society of Fauns, 1908-11), Shirakaba (The White Birch, 1910-23), Fyūzankai (The Charcoal Society, 1912-13), Nikakai (The Second Section Society, 1914- ), the Japan Creative Print Society (1918-31), MAVO (1923-25), Action (1922-24), etc. This paper considers why this was the case and how the social dynamics that these associations put in motion mediated the culture of art making. According to a “center-reaches-peripheries” view of history, the development of artistic modernism in early twentieth-century Japan may be regarded as a story of fast-paced introduction and omnivorous adaptation of latest trends from European metropolises, such as Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and so on. If one shifts the focus to the issue of group formation and dynamics, however, a different set of interpretive coordinates emerges. This new understanding will contextualize the culture of art groups within the broader pattern of socialization in Japan, and will highlight their collective and collaborative creative output, especially in the form of the print media, in facilitating, guiding, and correlating the flow of people, things, and ideas within and beyond Japan.

Noriko Murai is Associate Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. A specialist of modern Japanese art and the reception of Japanese art in the US, her publications in English include Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia (2009) and "Beyond Tenshin: Okakura Kakuzō's Multiple Legacies" (Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. 24, 2012).


This lecture was part of the symposium "Group Dynamics—Collectives of the Modernist Period", which was originally scheduled to take place at the Lenbachhaus on April 23–25, 2020. Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, we had to move it to the digital realm at short notice. The international symposium offers the opportunity to exchange ideas with renowned experts and prepares the ground for an exhibition and an accompanying publication of the same title scheduled for 2021, which are part of the program "Global Museum. Collections of the 20th Century from a Global Perspective" of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

For more information visit our website: https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/discover/museum-global
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