Kenji Kajiya, Associate Professor, Archival Research Center, Kyoto City University of Arts, examines the physical refabrication of art works from the history of postwar Japanese art. Such refabrications have been made for numerous survey exhibitions and for retrospectives of individual artists, including such major figures like Akasegawa Genpei, Lee Ufan, and Nakahara Kodai. The lecture considers not only the technical considerations behind refabrication, but the ways in which refabrication has shaped representations and understandings of the history of postwar Japanese art.
Kenji Kajiya is an art historian who specializes in 20th-century American and Japanese art. He earned his PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is working on a book project on color field painting in the cultural context of America. He has served as Director of the Oral Art History Archives of Japanese Art since 2006. He is a co-editor of From the Postwar to the Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945-1989: Primary Documents (2012) and the twelve-volume Selected Art Writings of Yūsuke Nakahara (2011-2015).
This lecture is generously sponsored by the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History.