Midori Yoshimoto - Post-1945 Transformations in East Asian Art

This lecture explores artistic production across East Asia in the decades following World War II, tracing how artists responded to rapidly changing political and cultural landscapes. In Maoist China, it examines Socialist Realism as an instrument of ideological formation, highlighting artists who shaped its visual language and those who later challenged it through independent experimentation, including members of the Xingxing (Stars) group. In Japan, the discussion considers the socially engaged Reportage painters of the 1950s alongside the Gutai Group’s radical investigations of material and performance, and the Mono-ha movement’s philosophical explorations of matter and space. In South Korea, the lecture addresses the emergence of Dansaekhwa, a form of minimalist abstraction rooted in meditative process, and situates it within a broader context of conceptual and experimental practices that questioned artistic and social conventions. Through these case studies, the lecture traces converging yet distinct trajectories of postwar modernism in East Asia, revealing how artists across the region redefined the relationship between art, society, and material experience.

Midori Yoshimoto is professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University. As art historian, Yoshimoto specializes in post-1945 Japanese art and its diaspora with a focus on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia.