Embedded Files
Bio
Bio
Faye Yuan Kleeman 阮斐娜 received her MA from Ochanomizu University (Tokyo) in 1981 and her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. She taught at the City University of New York, University of California at Riverside, and the College of William and Mary before joining the University of Colorado in 1998. She has been a visiting scholar at Chūō University (1989), Academia Sinica (1999, 2005), and the University of Tokyo (2000, 2006, 2010). She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including funding from the Japanese Ministry of Education (1978-81), Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Grant (1989), the NEH Research Grant (1999), the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (1999, 2005), the Japan Foundation Research Grant (2000, 2006), Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship (2009), and European Consortium of Humanity Studies (2013). She has served in national and international organizations as the President of the Association of Japanese Language Teachers of Colorado, President of the Division of East Asian Languages and Literatures of the MLA, and on the Executive Board of the North East Asia Council of AAS. Her research focuses on modern Japanese literature and culture, especially postwar fiction and film, women writers, minority (zainichi, buraku) literature, and Japanese colonial literature. Major publications include Under an Imperial Sun (Hawaii, 2003), Dainihon teikoku no kureōru (Keiō UP, 2007), In Transit: Formation of an East Asian Cultural Sphere (Hawaii, 2014) and numerous articles in English, Japanese, and Chinese.
Keynote - 11 january 2021 - JST 09 AM
Keynote - 11 january 2021 - JST 09 AM
It’s all the Shojo’s Fault: Censorship, Popular Culture, and High Art in 21st Century Japan
It’s all the Shojo’s Fault: Censorship, Popular Culture, and High Art in 21st Century Japan
Abstract
The 2019 Aichi Triennate International Art Exhibition was forced to terminate only a week after its grand opening. Titled in a tongue-in-cheek way, the Expression of Non-Freedom Exhibit (表現の不自由展) exhibited several controversial pieces, including a replica of a statue of a young girl sitting next to an empty chair called Shōjo of Peace, which Japanese critics considered a degrading symbol of the WW II comfort women. Censorship of art works is not new in Japan (though it often takes the form of self-censorship or jishuku), but in recent years, the opposition to the circulation of certain images seems to have hardened.
My paper looks at how consensus building and censorship function in contemporary Japan. Focusing on the consumption of the image of shōjo (young teenage girls), a ubiquitous trope that is at the core of the “cool” Japanese popular culture, the paper considers the delineation of aestheticism, the boundaries cultural cognition, and the global/domestic consumption divide. Specifically, I will use the works by contemporary artist Aida Makoto and artists in the Superflat Movement such as Murakami Takashi, Nara Yoshitomo, and Aoshima Chiho to compare their appropriations of shojo, which are distinctly different from those populating the manga and anime that are a staple of Otaku culture.
Aida Makoto is considered “the most representative artist to emerge during the 1990s” yet is often seen as “an artist for domestic consumption” and not as cool, hip, or global as Murakami or Nara, who became the darlings of Western art collectors and celebrities of the Euro-American art scene. (Adrian Favell 2018) Aida’s provocative works have not received attention outside of Japan. Aida himself is no stranger to censorship. His provocative graphic and performative art works are both deformative and transformative representations of shōjo iconography camouflaged through the use of kawaii and moe cultural elements. They reveal his blurring of the fault lines separating elegant/vulgar, academic/popular, and global/domestic in Japanese gender politics.
Page updated
Report abuse