Pottery and porcelain is one of the oldest Japanese crafts and art forms, dating back to the Neolithic period. Types have included earthenware, pottery, stoneware, porcelain, and blue-and-white ware. Japan has an exceptionally long and successful history of ceramic production. Earthenwares were made as early as the Jōmon period, giving Japan one of the oldest ceramic traditions in the world. Japan is further distinguished by the unusual esteem that ceramics hold within its artistic tradition, owing to the enduring popularity of the tea ceremony. During the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573-1603), kilns throughout Japan produced ceramics with unconventional designs. In the early Edo period, the production of porcelain commenced in the Hizen-Arita region of Kyushu, employing techniques imported from Korea. These porcelain works became known as Imari wares, named after the port of Imari from which they were exported to various markets, including Europe.
Kyoto Seika University is a private university in Iwakura, Kyoto, Japan. The school's predecessor was founded in 1968, and it was chartered as a university in 1979.
PHUNK is a Singapore-based contemporary art and design collective founded by Alvin Tan, Melvin Chee, Jackson Tan, and William Chan in 1994. They have exhibited and collaborated with artists, designers and fashion brands around the world, producing work across a diverse range of mediums.
Ayako Tabata, also known under her artist name Tabaimo, is a contemporary Japanese artist. She combines hand-drawn images and digital manipulation to create large scale animations which evoke traditional Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) while presenting a pointed, complex view of Japanese society.
Nadim Karam ; is a multidisciplinary Lebanese artist and architect who fuses his artistic output with his background in architecture to create large-scale urban art projects in different cities of the world. He uses his vocabulary of forms in urban settings to narrate stories and evoke collective memory with a very particular whimsical, often absurdist approach; seeking to 'create moments of dreams' in different cities of the world.
Chim-Pom is an artist collective formed in Tokyo in 2005, when all the members were in their twenties. The six members are Ellie (エリイ), Ryūta Ushiro (卯城竜太), Yasutaka Hayashi (林靖高), Masataka Okada (岡田将孝), Toshinori Mizuno (水野俊紀) and Motomu Inaoka (稲岡求).
Keiko Minami was a Japanese artist, aquatint engraver, and poet. She is best known for her pictograph-like aquatints with a whimsical, childlike aesthetic.
Onishi Yasuaki is a Japanese artist working in the mediums of installation, sculpture, and painting.
Andreas Lutz is a German Media artist. In his work, he explores the human machine relation with the approach, to create integrated and universal communication systems.
Jirō Takamatsu was one of the most important postwar Japanese artists. Takamatsu used photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and performance to fundamentally investigate the philosophical and material conditions of art. Takamatsu's practice was dedicated to the critique of cognition and perception, through the rendering and variation of morphological devices, such as shadow, tautology, appropriation, perceptual and perspective distortion and representation. Takamatsu's conceptual work can be understood through his notions of the Zero Dimension, which renders an object or form to observe its fundamental geometrical components. Takamatsu isolated these smallest constituent elements, asserting that these elements produce reality, or existence. For Takamatsu the elementary particle represents “the ultimate of division” and also “emptiness itself,” like the a line within a painting—there appears to be nothing more beyond the line itself. Yet, Takamatsu's end goal was not to just prove the presence or object-ness of these elements, but rather to use them as a way to challenge and prove the limits of human perception, leading to his fixation on “absence” or the things that are unobservable.
Osamu Suzuki (1926-2001) was a Japanese ceramicist and one of the co-founders of the artist group Sōdeisha, a Japanese avant-garde ceramics movement that arose following the end of the Second World War and served as a counter to the traditional forms and styles in modern Japanese ceramics, such as Mingei. Working in both iron-rich stoneware and porcelain, Suzuki developed his style considerably over the course of his career, beginning with functional vessels in his early work, and spanning to fully sculptural works in the latter half of his career. Suzuki has been described by The Japan Times as "one of Japan's most important ceramic artists of the 20th century."
Koki Tanaka is a Japanese artist and videographer. He was a visiting scholar at Tokyo Zokei University. His work is Minimalist, and primarily focused with finding the unusual in everyday objects and situations.
Wah Nu is a contemporary artist from Myanmar.
Albert Yonathan Setyawan is an Indonesian contemporary ceramic artist, living in Japan.
Katsuhiro Yamaguchi was a Japanese artist and art theorist based in Tokyo and Yokohama. Through his collaborations, writings, and teaching, he promoted an interdisciplinary avant-garde in postwar Japan that served as the foundation for the emergence of Japanese media art in the early 1980s, a field in which he remained active until his death. He represented Japan at the 1968 Venice Biennale and the 1975 Bienal de São Paulo, and served as producer for the Mitsui Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka.
Tokyo Biennale ‘70: Between Man and Matter opened in May 1970 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and later traveled to Kyoto, Nagoya and Fukuoka. It was the tenth of eighteen international art exhibitions held between 1952 and 1990, sponsored and organised by Mainichi Shimbun, a newspaper with a long history of organising significant art exhibitions. In the history of biennials, Tokyo Biennale '70 marked a shift from the national-representation and prize-awarding model to one that was focused on the forefront developments of contemporary art practice. Specifically, there was a conscious juxtaposition of the latest trends of Post-minimalism and Conceptualism across Euro-America and Japan.
Hikaru Fujii is a contemporary Japanese artist who explores the relationship between art, history, and social activism. Primarily working in documentary film and multi-channel video installation, Fujii employs archival research, fieldwork, interviews, and workshops to create artworks to examine the relationships between historical narrative and education, structural violence, crisis, race, and power. Of particular interest for him are the role and responsibility of museums and institutions as sites that preserve and perpetuate specific historical narratives. After the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear disaster, Fujii has actively documented the disaster and raised awareness around the world about the situation in Japan.
Yusuke Nakahara was a renowned Japanese art critic, curator, scholar, lecturer, university president, art festival organizer, and cultural administrator.
Aki Inomata is a Japanese multidisciplinary contemporary artist and designer based in Tokyo. Her work addresses identity and displacement, and questions societal boundaries between humans versus animals and the natural versus man-made worlds. Much of her artistic practice aims at creating collaborative interspecies relationships through such contemporary modeling technologies as 3-D scanning and printing techniques. Inomata's cross-disciplinary Bio Art projects complicate the notion of production while proposing a new awareness of human and nonhuman ecologies, as she states: "The concept of my works is to get people to perceive the modes of life of various living creatures by experience a kind of empathy toward them."
Tatsuo Kawaguchi is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist, whose practice often involves the use of objects and the investigation of materials. After studying painting at Tama Art University, Kawaguchi's diverse oeuvre has included drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. He also co-founded the Group "i", a Kobe-based artistic collective, in 1965.
