Subsidized to English Translations of essays for the catalogue "For a New World to Come: Experiments in Art And Photography, 1968-1979 Japan"

The exhibition “For a New World to Come: Experiments in Art and Photography, 1968-1979 Japan” will be held at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston from March 8 through July 12, 2015.

Focusing on the late 1960s up to the late 1970s, it will showcase new sensations Japanese photography brought about during in this era. The Tokyo Olympics, and the Osaka Expo 1970 were held, Okinawa was returned to Japan, and such issues did not only raise debates, but gave birth to social movements. From 1955 to 1973 Japan had seen an unbridled economic miracle. Still, the Oil Shock in 1973 had caused a rapid decrease in economic growth. The economic situation changed people’s awareness and became an opportunity to reconsider or abandon established values.

Against the backdrop of this era, photography was a means of experimentation. The exhibition will thus feature works by 26 Japanese artists (among which the photographers Shomei Tomatsu, Hitoshi Nomura, Koji Enokura, Kiyoji Otsuji, Daido Moriyama), who opened up new perspectives and possibilities for photography in with their respective practices. The worldwide trend in art of this era, i.e. photography’s role in the frame of conceptual art, will also be treated.

The exhibition will combine the staggering range of 300 artworks, such as photographs, installations and films, most of them loan from The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo Polytechnic University, the archives of Musashino Art University, as well as from Tokyo and New York based galleries, artist’s and private collections. It will be the first opportunity to present these artworks in a museum in the United States.

The catalogue to accompany the exhibition will not only inventory the artworks on show, but bring together essays by American and Japanese curators in charge, as well as papers by researchers in the field of Japanese contemporary art, film and photography from universities and art museums. The JCRI subsidized the English translations of Japanese essays and papers to be published. The exhibition catalogue will be published and internationally distributed by The Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Yale University Press. As the exhibition 2015 is still in preparation, the next report will probably be more detailed. Moreover, the exhibition is planned to travel from Houston to circulate in New York galleries.